


raised on fairy tales (we grew up to learn truths)

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: tales of gutsy shinobi [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bildugsroman, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Girls in Love, Multi, Soulmate AU, Team 10, Team 7 is a disaster, Useless Sapphics, a lot of plotless kissing and indulgent character bits, all my OTPs are also BrOTPs, dryad!Sakura
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-23 20:10:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 29,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10726353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: They are shinobi: they lie and cheat and steal. There is nothing the world gifts a girl that is not heartbreak, she must steal happiness, steal joy, steal laughter melting on her tongue and summer kisses and other soft things. (Ino taught Sakura to be selfish, and in a life made from sacrifice, they seize every drop of sunshine they can.)Yet another tumblr oneshot collection.





	1. what we stole in the night

**Author's Note:**

> This is also crossposted to ff.net.

They stumble home after the party, tipsy and giggling in their dresses after a night of fun.

“Fuck,” Ino groans, toeing out of her heels. “I love these shoes, but after that long standing in them, even I have to wonder if beauty is worth the pain.”

Sakura remains paused in the doorway, captured by the curve of Ino’s spine as she stretches her arms above her head, the cascade of her hair shimmering softly in the dim light echoing into the entrance hall from the kitchen.

“Want me to fix that?” Sakura offers, stepping out of her own, much more modest heels.

Ino turns and slings her arms over Sakura’s shoulders. “Mmm, yes please.”  
She drops a kiss onto Sakura’s lips, and then saunters down the hall to the bedroom, the extra sway in her gait drawing the eye. Sakura hurriedly shuts the door and resets the traps, ignoring their mess of discarded shoes and bags to follow after Ino. Tidying up can wait until the morning.

She pauses again in the doorway of their bedroom. Ino has collapsed onto the bed, the skirt of her dress riding high on her thighs. She looks like a spill of champagne across their sheets: all blonde hair and pale silk and sparkling diamonds. Sakura feels drunk on just the image of her, laid out for her eyes only.

Ino flirts with everyone—teasing them with dripping innuendo and hooded bedroom eyes and pouting lips—but only Sakura gets her like this. Only Sakura gets Ino warmed with bedroom light glow, sporting slightly smeared makeup and a tangle of hair. Only Sakura gets Ino to keep.

Sakura might have to share Ino with the village that owns their bodies and their souls, but she doesn’t have to share well. And so Sakura does her best to steal them back—their bodies and their souls—to keep all for herself; she presses soft kisses and bruising fingers to Ino’s scars, hoards Ino’s breathless laughter and gasping cries, wraps her greedy hands around Ino’s heart and does her best to keep it safe.

Sakura is selfish and wanting, but it is Ino, and Ino has never tried to coax her into something gentler.

(It was Ino who taught Sakura to demand what she wanted, and—if the Universe wasn’t willing to give her what she demanded—to take it and own it and never let it go. And Sakura has never felt less guilty for being selfish than when she has Ino spread out underneath her or hovering over her or wrapped around her.)

Sakura lowers herself to perch on the bed, and draws Ino’s right foot into her lap, pulling just a drop of chakra into her hands, skating along the delicate ankle bones and instep.

Ino’s moan at the first push of Sakura’s thumb into her heel is a rich, dark sound that shivers through the night. Sakura continues, pulling more pleased gasps and groans from Ino’s throat.

Ino has her hands fisted in the blankets and her head thrown back as she melts down into the mattress, pleasure pulling at her bones. By the time Sakura finishes Ino’s left foot, she’s reduced the blonde to half-lidded eyes and flushed cheeks and near-desperate whines.

“Fuck,” Ino moans. “Enough with the foot massage, get up here, Forehead.”

Sakura smirks as she skates her hands up Ino’s legs, chakra soothing the muscles on her way, only stopping when her fingers meet the silk doing little to protect any pretence of modesty. She toys with the skirt before finally pulling herself up to straddle Ino’s hips.

Ino just stares up at her, that lovely, irresistible smile dripping off her lips, and Sakura has to dip her head down to taste it.

Ino spears her fingers through Sakura’s short hair, pulling her further in, and they lose themselves in slow, decadent kisses. They take turns sipping from one another’s mouths, a practiced give and take that nonetheless always leaves Sakura breathless.

Time bleeds, turning sticky amber in the soft glow of the warm lighting.

At some point, Ino flips them to leave her hovering over Sakura, but there’s no urgency to it. They have all night.

(They have as long as they can steal from the Universe. They have forever.)

Kisses turn to caresses turn to dresses falling off of them like moonlight, interspersed with giggles and gasped.

When Sakura’s dress has finally found itself flung off the bed into the scattered shadows along with her bra, Ino rocks back to admire her. There is no room for embarrassment here in the closed sanctum of their bedroom, not when there’s nothing between them, not even secrets.

“Sakura,” Ino breathes, her smile something softer and more sacred than her usual beguiling smirk, and she reaches out a hand to trace a line down Sakura’s sternum.

Sakura had always resented her small breasts, until Ino and the way they rest perfectly in her palms. Ino drops to mouth at them, her lips looking almost plum with the remnants of the night’s lipstick where they wrap around the pale pink of Sakura’s areole.

“Oh,” Sakura breathes, the slow burn of lust that has chased her through the night with every brush of Ino’s skin against her own bubbling up into something effervescent and almost blinding. “Ino, please.”

Ino takes her time paying her due worship, rewarding Sakura’s rising pleas with teasing brushes of her fingers along her sides, the inside of her elbow, the length of her neck.

Sakura does her best to pay her back, but every time she collects her scattered thoughts enough to do more than grasp uselessly at Ino’s hair, she gets distracted by Ino suckling a bruise into the soft underside of her breast or plucking with sudden viciousness at her nipple.

“Ino,” Sakura pants, “I can’t— I need— Please.”

Ino pulls her head back, her bright blue eyes burning. Then she stretches up to drop a delicate kiss on Sakura’s mouth. Sakura tries to chase her, but Ino holds her down with a palm to the hollow of her throat and gentle fingers spread across her collarbones.

“Watch,” she commands. Only when she’s certain that Sakura is staying put and doing as she’s told does Ino trail her fingers down across the flushed skin of Sakura’s chest, tracing spirals that skirt the edges of the scars on her abdomen. Sakura shivers, but stays still, and watches.

Ino lets her fingers tangle in the scrap of green lace Sakura is still wearing and tugs sharply. Sakura’s hips buck at the sudden rasp against her slit, not quite enough, and then Ino dips her thumb down under the material to strum Sakura’s clit.

“Fuck, yes. More.”

Ino draws maddening circles and lines, never settling into a rhythm, and every time Sakura thinks that yes, there, just like that— Ino shifts into something slower, but no less heady.

“Ino,” Sakura whines, “please.” 

Ino cocks her head, and she must be pleased with the wrecked mess she’s turned Sakura into because she finally, finally slides one finger in her cunt and quickly follows it up with a second and then a third. It’s almost too much, too fast, Ino harsh and demanding as she plunges the digits in and out, but Ino always pushes Sakura to the edge, and then a bit farther. Because she knows that Sakura can take it.

Sakura flutters around the perfect, lovely fingers curling into her, almost sobbing because she can’t— it’s too much— she’s going to—

Ino leans forward, her fingers never stopping, and bites at Sakura’s earlobe. “Now, Sakura. Come for me now.”

And Sakura has never been able to refuse Ino what she wants, not really, and especially not when she wants the same thing.

Ino demands her orgasm, so Sakura gives it to her and shatters.

(Ino is Ino, though, and she may not be the healer that Sakura is, but it is always Ino who puts Sakura back together when she shatters.)

Ino coaxes her through it, fingers gentling, raining sparkling kisses over Sakura’s face as she comes back to herself.

“Mm,” Sakura hums, languid and buzzing with sated pleasure. And then she flips Ino, pulling a shriek of surprise from her. Ino is wide eyed, already mostly undone just from Sakura: Sakura’s body and Sakura’s sounds and Sakura. 

Sakura will never get over how she can drive beautiful, untouchable Ino to this.

(Only Sakura gets to touch Ino in any way that counts.)

“Your turn, I think,” Sakura promises, and she kisses Ino sweetly before slinking down, down, down to where Ino is bare and perfect and Sakura’s.

And then when Sakura finally takes the time to really admire Ino’s pussy for the first time that night, she has to turn and press her laughter into the inside of Ino’s knee, because apparently Ino took the time this morning to shave the cropped blonde hair on her mons into an arrow, to guide Sakura down. Because on the occasions where Ino decides to forego subtlety, she tends to eschew it completely.

“I thought you might need a guide,” Ino taunts, waggling her eyebrows. “You know, if you ever want to be able to give head as well as me.”

And oh, that is a dare if Sakura has ever heard one.

Normally Sakura would take her time until the only sounds Ino can make with that smart, impossible mouth of hers are pleas for more, godsdamnit it Sakura, do it like you mean it. But tonight, she just wants to make Ino scream.

Sakura cups her hands under Ino’s thighs and lifts her legs onto her shoulders, spreading her lovely, swollen labia majora with her thumbs, and then she licks up her slit. Ino tastes like heady wine and everything Sakura has ever wanted and thought she could never have. She drinks down everything Ino has to give: her taste and her full-body tremors and her greedy hands on the back of Sakura’s head and her gorgeous, broken sounds.

Sakura suckles and slurps and laves and bites and hums her own moans of appreciation into Ino’s skin. It’s tongue and clit and teeth and lips and Ino’s thighs clamped around her head. Sakura drowns in her, and doesn’t bother trying to breathe.

When Ino finally orgasms, she arches off the bed in a perfect curve, and Sakura wants her to do it again, so she pulls one hand away from where it’s been kneading Ino’s ass, holding her hips up at the perfect angle for Sakura to devour her, and she presses two fingers into Ino’s still spasming cunt. Then she drops her mouth back down and traces patterns on Ino’s clit, fingers scissoring, until Ino comes again around her.

Sakura keeps her fingers curled in Ino’s perfect warmth until Ino pushes her away, trembling with overstimulation.

“So,” Sakura asks, propping her chin on Ino’s sternum, “how’d I do?”

Ino pulls her up by her shoulders and licks her own juices off of Sakura’s drenched face. “You’ll do,” she sighs. “I guess I’ll keep you.”

They trade lazy kisses until Sakura finally drags herself off the bed to get them some warm cloths with which to clean themselves up and a pair of overly large jōnin shirts to climb into.

They giggle as they drag almost too rough towels over still sensitive skin, but the effervescent lust from before and the earlier drinking and dancing and fun has left them with little energy to do anything else about the sparkling pleasure of teasing touches. Ino throws the towels to join their dresses in a tangled heap, waving off Sakura’s protests with the promise that they’ll deal with the mess in the morning.

“Sleep, Forehead,” Ino orders, so Sakura subsides and leans over to turn out the light before nestling into the curve of Ino’s body.

Ino pulls the covers up over their heads and presses a lingering kiss to the curve of Sakura’s cheekbone, the tip of her nose, her chin.

“I love you,” Ino breathes into her mouth with one final kiss, like a secret, like something only theirs and not belonging to anything beyond the boundaries of their bodies.

Sakura drags her fingers through Ino’s tangle of hair and smiles into her temple. “Love you, too.”

Slowly, they sink into dreams, wrapped together in blankets and warmth and darkness.

(They swore their bodies and souls to the village when they were young. But it was Ino who first looked at Sakura and saw something worthy and so it is Ino to whom Sakura entrusts her heart.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** Smut Monday: November 21 “Champagne (at midnight)”


	2. 32. I think you are beautiful and I would like to kiss you. I can think up some clever lines, if you’d prefer. But I wanted to say that, first. (None of those lines seemed to be about you or me.)

Sakura has been staring at her like she’s a particularly unusual viral strain out of the dampest, most isolated corner of Ame. Ino burns where that stare flays the skin from her bones.

If Sakura doesn’t spit out whatever is bothering her soon, Ino is going to strong-arm Shikamaru into trussing Sakura up in shadows so that Ino can pull it out from behind green eyes. She can’t take it anymore, the staring.

It’s giving her hope for what will never be.

.  
.  
.

Ino has always loved being the centre of attention: bold and beautiful.

She smiles, bats her lashes, tosses her hair.

Chōji stands at her shoulder, arms crossed over a barrel chest.

Shikamaru lurks in corners: waiting, watchful.

(Some teams are front line brawlers. Some teams weave webs in the dark. Ask Ino what Team 10 does and she’ll laugh, a full throated golden thing. (You won’t even feel it when she slips behind your eyes.))

Ino has always loved being the centre of attention, especially when it could pull Sakura’s attention away from boys who have never understood that Sakura is made of flower petals, of sediment, of teeth.

(Sakura is softness and unyielding strength and enough simmering rage to tear your heart out. Sakura is Ino’s; Ino found her first.)

.  
.  
.

Ino doesn’t remember meeting Shikamaru and Chōji. They just are.

Ino has blonde hair, has ten fingers, has blue eyes, has Shikamaru and Chōji at her sides.

Ino is Ino because she is also a piece of Ino-Shika-Chō.

Swathed in a delicate kimono with thorns and roses crawling up from the hem, Ino watches the group of civilian girls giggling behind fans, their interested gaze resting heavy on Shikamaru hiding his face in his hands at Chōji’s attempts to win a stuffed animal from a carnival game. The girls are watching her back, too, their eyes darting between the amused twist of Ino’s mouth and Shikamaru’s blush and Chōji’s glee when he pops all of the balloons.

“Who are they?” the boldest of the group sidles up to ask. She doesn’t bother pointing out who she means, trusting that Ino knows.

Ino bares her teeth in a mockery of a sugar-sweet smile. “Mine.”

The girl flinches back, and her group of friends are hasty in their retreat to another part of the festival.

Ino dismisses them, returns her attention softly back to Chōji with his arm swung around a reluctantly-pleased Shikamaru. A stuffed deer is clutched to his chest. Ino joins them.

.  
.  
.

“Hey, Ino,” Sakura calls softly, swinging her feet through the window to join Ino on the ledge.

Ino doesn’t startle; she knew Sakura was coming.

Konoha stretches out before them, lights shimmering between trees, safe and whole and theirs.

“Hey,” Ino sighs, closing her eyes and letting her head drop back against the wall.

“I thought the boys would have to drag you home. I wasn’t expecting to find you hiding out,” Sakura prods.

Ino can feel the worry seeping off of her, and sighs again. She doesn’t want to explain why she had to escape the party raging inside Kiba’s apartment.

But Sakura was looking up at Naruto like he was the sun, Naruto curving down, softly, around her, a quiet smile on his lips that Ino has never seen anyone else pull out of him. And Ino knows exactly what those two deserve after all that they’ve done and everything that they’ve lost, she just couldn’t bear to stick around and see them finally wise up and grasp what’s standing right in front of them.

“You didn’t have to come out here and check on me, Sakura. I’m a big girl. Go back to Naruto.” Ino wonders if Sakura can hear the bitterness that she does her best to keep tucked under her tongue.

“I wasn’t going to leave you out here alone, Ino,” Sakura says, hurt.

And oh, fuck, Ino never wants to be the one to put that crack in Sakura’s voice. Not ever. Not the same one that Sasuke carved into her with every dismissal. Not the same one that Naruto accidentally widened with every entreaty that Sakura stay back, stay safe.

“I don’t mean—” Ino tries. “That’s not— It was just too much, okay? I just needed a minute to breathe.”

“Oh.” Sakura’s shoulders drop out of their protective hunch. “I— Do you want me to go?”

Ino grabs her wrist before she can move. “No.” She stifles a flinch at how much she’s given away with that desperate move. “No. Stay. Please.”

Sakura nods, and settles against Ino’s side. She doesn’t pull her wrist away from where Ino’s fingers are still wrapped around the fragile bones.

The pulse fluttering under her touch fills Ino with desperate, aimless wanting. Sakura will stay here, with her, thinking that Ino just needs a friend to share silence and grief with. And Ino will let her, because she is a selfish, selfish creature who holds onto the things that she thinks are hers too tight.

If Ino were a good friend, an honest friend, she’d let Sakura go back inside where it is warm and full of friends, where Sakura’s own personal sun is shining.

But Ino is many things, including a spy and a killer. Holding onto Sakura with greedy fingers isn’t the most terrible thing she’s done. Just, perhaps, the most selfish.

The moonlight paints Sakura softly, and Ino loses herself in the beat of Sakura’s pulse and the thrum of conversation echoing out to greet them and the warmth pressed against her side.

Of course, because Ino has stolen the moment, it doesn’t last.

Sakura’s gaze burns the side of her face. Ino wonders what she sees: the shape of bones, the pattern of muscle, the nigh-invisible scar left by a kunai Ino only just managed to dodge.

Sakura’s gaze burns, and Ino finally take it anymore, she turns her head to glare at green eyes straight on, demand what does Sakura want from her because Ino is going to be nothing but ash if she doesn’t stop.

Sakura’s green eyes are so bright in the moonlight that Ino’s scathing question catches in her throat.

She can’t look away as Sakura worries her lip. She wants to reach up and stop Sakura from abusing herself so. She wants to reach up and take that lip for her own.

“Ino,” Sakura whispers.

Ino can’t open her mouth, because if she does, all of the selfish things she wants are going to spill out of her.

“Ino,” Sakura continues, wrecked. “I— Fuck. This is going to end so badly if I’ve read this wrong.” She shakes her head, straightens her spine. “Look, I’m— If you say no, we’ll never talk about this again, okay? But just.”

Sakura reaches up, and brushes her thumb along Ino’s cheekbone.

Ino is helpless to do anything other than let her eyes flutter shut.

“Ino, you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I want very much to kiss you.”

Ino’s heart convulses or turns over or some other violent, lovely thing. Her eyes wrench open to take in the nervous hope spilled across Sakura’s face.

Ino has heard so many useless pick up lines from girls and boys who thought that her smirk was an invitation, and some of them she’s even brought home with her. But nothing has ever cracked her soul open like this stilted declaration from her best friend.

Ino pauses. “I thought you were in love with Naruto?”

Sakura startles, shocked. And then she starts to shake, mouth twitching and shoulders heaving and full-bodied laughter echoing out into the moonlight. “Naruto?” Sakura chuckles. “Wrong blonde best friend, Ino.”

Ino is a selfish creature.

She hooks her fingers behind Sakura’s jaw, and pulls her in.

Sakura taste like flower petals. She likes to press biting kisses down Ino’s throat.

Ino falls, and Sakura is right there to catch her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** 32\. I think you are beautiful and I would like to kiss you. I can think up some clever lines, if you’d prefer. But I wanted to say that, first. (None of those lines seemed to be about you or me.) from [A Softer World Prompts](http://sleepy-skittles.tumblr.com/post/155287327552/50-a-softer-world-prompts)


	3. my solemn vow, my pledged troth

It’s instinct when she wakes—gasping, the dark pressing down on her chest and crushing the breath from her, screams in her ears, blood on her hands—to pull on a shirt and bolt through her window and across the skyline.

Sakura is a whisper, flicking so fast between buildings that the only sign she was ever there are bloodied footprints. She left her boots behind in her panic; there’s nothing but skin between her and the rough patchwork of wooden shingles and ceramic tiles and brick.

Eyes hidden behind porcelain masks track her movement, but they look away quickly, not daring to intrude on her hurting.

Sakura runs and, as always, the bedroom window is flung wide.

It’s like breathing to snag the kunai coming at her head out of the air as she swings herself through the window, feet first, palm planted firmly on the sill.

Ino is there to catch her, the two of them colliding in midair.

Sakura trembles, her hands glowing as she pulls them across Ino’s skin, trying to find the wounds she’d dreamt gouged into Ino’s skin. There’s nothing there but warmth and scars, so Sakura pushes her chakra deeper, making sure, and there is Ino’s heart pumping, her lungs inflating, her blood rushing, her bones creaking, her neurons singing. There she is: alive.

“Ino,” Sakura sobs into Ino’s throat.

Ino has one hand cupping Sakura’s head, the other clutching her hip. “Sakura,” she says, and presses a kiss to Sakura’s hair. “Sakura, Sakura, Sakura.” With each iteration of her name, Ino presses a kiss to her forehead, her temple, her nose. “You’re alive. I’m alive. We’re alive.”

Alive, alive, alive. The word crawls under Sakura’s skin alongside Ino’s hitched breathing and her steady, steady heart.

They’re alive.

It was just a dream.

Sakura’s knees give out, and Ino hauls them backwards. They collapse onto the bed in a flurry of limbs, unwilling to let go, lest the dark crawl between them and rip them to pieces.

(Sakura is small and quiet and so, so scared the first time Ino drags her up into the bright purple bedroom with flowers exploding in every corner: in vases and on walls and stitched onto blankets. Ino pulls Sakura under those flower blankets and they hide and giggle and they are so very, very safe there, in this purple room.

Sakura is heartbroken and lost and so, so alone the hundredth time Ino drags her up into the muted purple bedroom with flowers tucked into corner: hiding pressed in books and floating in perfume and stitched delicately onto kimonos. Ino pulls Sakura under blankets that are no longer flowered and they hide and cry and Sakura is so very, very safe for the first time since the mission to Nami no Kuni and everything that followed in this purple room.

Sakura is bloodied and war-stained and so, so weary the thousandth time Ino drags her up into the no longer purple bedroom with flowers gone to seed for lack of tending, dried out husks of colour, vases left with the remnants of rotted things. Ino pulls Sakura under dusty blankets and they hide and hold each other and they are no longer safe because war now lives in their minds and inside this no longer purple bedroom and nothing will ever be the same again.

But they are alive.

It is enough.)

“I dreamt—” Sakura begins, but Ino interrupts her.

“I know. I dreamt it too.”

Of course she did.

Because what Ino did in the war, diving so deep into so many minds, spreading herself so thin, that took an anchor so as not to lose herself amidst the thousands of shinobi she spoke to, spoke with, spoke through. And no one quite knew Ino the way Sakura knew Ino.

And now no one quite knows Ino the way Sakura knows Ino.

Because Ino dug herself deep and planted roots in Sakura’s mind and, guarded by the ghost of a girl never realized, she grew down, down, down and held firm even as she grew up, up, up and spread wide.

Afterwards. After it was done, Ino ripped herself free, but what was done was done.

There are some things you can’t undo.

Shoots of Ino spring up out of the soil of Sakura’s mind, bright dandelion things, and just as persistent.

They dream the same dreams some nights, and Sakura always knows when Ino is craving her favourite, outrageously expensive chocolate.

They dream the same nightmares too. Sakura wakes some nights, her hands outstretched, and maybe if she could reach a little further she could catch her father, rip him out of the way of the bijūdama, rip him out of her head because he is saying goodbye and he doesn’t get to say goodbye to her like this, not when she’s too far away, not when he’s not an old man dying peacefully in his bed at home and oh. Not her father. Not her tōsan.

They dream the same dreams. Sakura has seen herself die so many times.

That’s what woke her tonight, a gaping hole where her heart should be as blood burbles up over her lips. “No,” she’d said, she’d screamed, she’d whispered. “No. C’mon Sakura. Not like this. Don’t you dare die on me. Are you Senju Tsunade’s apprentice or what?” Her hands had trembled, spluttering green, not enough.

The life had spluttered out of green eyes, too, and she’d woken and run.

She’d forgotten who was Sakura and who was Ino, had forgotten everything but choking on blood and scrabbling at the last grains of chakra and the need to find that other piece of herself, make sure she was safe.

Under her ear, Ino’s heartbeat is steady and familiar. Sakura digs her fingers more firmly between the lines of Ino’s ribs. Ino pulls her closer by the shoulders, Sakura mostly on top of her from their inelegant stagger backwards. It’s all skin and warmth and breath and moonlight spilling through the window.

Distantly, Sakura’s feet ache, but it’s more important to touch her tongue to Ino’s pulse and taste the salt there, more important to breathe in the subtle scent of flowers and iron and weapon oil, more important to feel Ino under her, solid and warm and real.

“If you die,” Sakura swears. “I’ll kill you.”

Ino laughs, a golden thing that rings Sakura’s mind, shakes in Sakura’s ribcage. “I know.” She bites Sakura’s jaw. “If you die, I’ll hate you forever.”

(In the deepest darkest parts of her, Sakura is running through ideas for how to bring back the dead. Because she isn’t kidding, not really; if Ino dares go get herself killed, Sakura is going to drag her back to the world of the living so that she can kill her herself for daring leave Sakura alone.)

Eventually, their breathing slows and they fall into dreams, chasing each other through forests and under blankets and across meadows.

They fall into dreams, wrapped up together.

(In the deepest darkest parts of her, something golden and shining laughs.

“Silly girl,” a tree whispers to a ghost of a girl never realized, “you’ll never be alone again.”)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** "I will tell you my life’s dreams in the depth of the blue night. / My naked soul will tremble in your hands / on your shoulders my burden will weigh down." ~Delmira Agustini


	4. hands to [insert action here]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I debated with myself whether I should include this oneshot in this collection, considering that it's InoShikaSaku, not just straight up (lol) InoSaku. But it is, in many ways, about Sakura and Ino. Plus, I'm fairly proud of it, and not above repping my own stuff.

The evening has spun down, leaving Ino’s apartment a mess of empty bottles and demolished food stuffs. Naruto walked Hinata back to the Hyūga compound hours ago, with Lee dragging a giggling Tenten away soon after with a reminder that the two of them have a mission in the morning. When the rest of them started to make noise about getting everyone else home for the night, they’d all looked up to find Shino had disappeared at some point, presumably before he could be wrangled into managing Kiba. Chōji had offered to help Akamaru make sure a very drunk Kiba doesn’t fall asleep in a doorway (again), since the Inuzuka’s apartment is on his way. Which means that Sakura and Shikamaru are stuck on clean-up duty.

It’s too bad Sai is out of the Village at the moment; he’s read so many books on proper etiquette that he always insists on helping whomever’s turn it is to host their regular get-togethers clean up, meaning that Sakura can usually duck out with a wave.

Ah, teammates. So useful.

She and Shikamaru trade amused eye-rolls as Ino orders them around, but though they grumble under their breath, it’s Ino. There are much worse fates Sakura and Shikamaru would follow Ino through than cleaning up after a party with friends.

“Forehead!” Ino snaps.

“Yes, Pig.” Sakura braces herself for another lecture on how she’s useless at placing decorative pillows.

“Do you have a shift at the hospital tomorrow afternoon?”

And, well, that’s better than getting yelled at over pillow placement. “No,” Sakura answers, still on guard for a scolding. “I have tomorrow off.”

“Excellent.” And then Ino waves a bottle of sake at her.

Sakura inhales sharply. She isn’t the fan of the drink her shishō is, but Sakura didn’t spend years under the tutelage of Senju Tsunade and emerge not knowing her sake. And that is a bottle of very, _very_ expensive sake in Ino’s hand.

“I thought the party was over,” Shikamaru drawls, collapsing onto the terrible couch that dominates Ino’s now clean living room.

"The party," Ino declares, "is never over.”

Once again this evening, Sakura and Shikamaru roll their eyes in unison.

Of course.

“What if _I_ have something I need to be up for tomorrow morning?” Shikamaru asks.

Sakura sits on his feet and he scowls at her, pulling them out from under her.

Ino just looks at him. “Nice try. I know you’re off for the next couple of days.”

“Something could have come up.”

Sakura turns, joining Ino in her wry disbelief.

It’s Ino. As if she isn’t completely aware of where Shikamaru is supposed to be at any given point of the day, if only so that she can yell at him if she catches him napping when he’s supposed to be doing something else. (Sakura knows that that isn’t it at all, that to reduce Ino’s careful watch over her teammates does her a disservice. But it’s an image Ino cultivates—all careless cruelty and bossiness—when the truth is something much softer and possessive than that.)

Shikamaru blinks and shrugs. “Well it could have.” He pauses, looks at Ino’s smirk, and sighs. “But nothing has. Yes, Ino, I’d love to stay and drink some more with you.”

The “troublesome” is implied.

Ino rocks back on her heels, smug pleasure tugging at her mouth. “I’ll go get us some cups then.”

After she’s returned and placed cups and bottle on the coffee table, Ino drops onto Shikamaru’s stomach.

They lose the next couple of minutes to shoving, swearing, and elbows to vulnerable body parts, eventually somehow settling with Sakura pressed up close between Ino and Shikamaru, all thighs and shoulders and heat as they huddle together on the slightly too small couch.

Sakura drops her head against Shikamaru’s bicep as he nurses the bruise that’s sure to bloom on his cheekbone and Ino leans forward to pour.

“Drink.” Ino shoves cups into their hands.

They drink.

And then they drink some more, their conversation meandering between disparate topics, lulling into comfortable silences, never landing anywhere in particular. Sakura and Shikamaru argue about a book. Ino regales them with amusing customer service stories. Shikamaru mocks the diplomats sent on behalf of the Daimyo that he was forced to put up with for the last week. They reminisce over a disaster of a mission from their chūnin days, in that short breath of a moment where they thought they knew heartbreak, not knowing what they would become, what they would survive.

It’s a rhythm of conservation that she knows the same way she knows the susurration of her blood through her veins, the beat of her heart.

(Gods, who could have ever known they would make it here, all those years ago when Ino brushed the hair out of Sakura’s face and told her to put her chin up? Who could have ever known they would make it? So young to have war in their bones, but so alive; Shikamaru and Ino warm and vital at her sides.)

“Ino,” Sakura contemplates at one point, “you didn’t steal this from the shipment the Mizukage sent Tsunade-shishō as a thank you gift for handling that thing with the pirate fleet, did you?”

Shikamaru’s moan of despair rumbles through her and he buries his face in his hands.

Ino rolls her eyes and drops her head back against the couch arm that she’s twisted herself to lean against. “Sakura, do I look dumb enough to steal alcohol from Senju Tsunade?”

Sakura just looks at her. “We’ve done it before.”

Ino purses her lips. “Once.” She sweeps her hair to drape over the edge of the couch. “Do I look dumb enough to do it again?”

Shikamaru moans louder. “Please tell me this isn’t the favour you owe Genma for,” he demands of his palms where his face is still buried. “I’m too young to die.”

“Ah,” Sakura says. “So _you_ didn’t steal it.”

Ino sniffs. “Again, what do you take me for, an idiot?”

Sakura considers the mostly finished bottle. “Well,” she decides, “might as well make the most of it.”

She isn’t expected anywhere tomorrow. She can always flee the village and go missing nin. Run to Suna, maybe. Gaara always does insist that he owes her for saving Kankuro. He’ll probably protect her from her shishō’s wrath.

“I’m going to die,” Shikamaru sighs.

Ino shrugs and laughs.

He takes the cup when Sakura hands it to him though.

They finish the bottle.

Shinobi live short and painful lives. They take what they can, when they can. (And they are so brilliantly alive, now, when three years ago Sakura wasn’t certain they would all make it here.)

Sakura is warm and the light in the room has turned sticky amber, like time has slowed and all there is and will ever be is the three of them here, tumbled together on Ino’s terrible couch. She hums, soft and low, as Shikamaru cards through her hair, his thigh firm under her cheek. Ino’s feet press against the small of her back, tucked between Sakura and the back of the couch.

Sakura feels her eyes grow heavy and they flutter, struggling against the weight, as she considers just letting herself fall through this moment and into sleep.

Shikamaru and Ino’s conversation laps over her.

She drifts, carried by the sound of their voices and the warmth running through her veins.

An age passes.

Sakura resurfaces, sound slowly shifting from soothing nonsense to words to understanding.

Ino’s laughing at her latest romantic misadventure, but there’s something almost bitter underscoring the careless amusement she’s projecting.

“Why bother sticking it out as long as you did?” Shikamaru asks. “Sounds like it was more trouble than it was worth.”

Ino’s shrug shakes the couch. “He might have been a jealous asshole, but gods Shika, the things that man can do with his tongue!”

Sakura shivers at the curl in Ino’s voice and blinks her eyes open.

“No sex is worth getting yelled at for being good at your job, Ino,” she rasps, voice edged with alcohol and sleep.

“He regretted the yelling,” Ino promises, and Sakura wants to wrap herself around that dark viciousness. “But, I mean, I could put up with the misplaced jealousy when I could redirect it into frankly excellent angry sex.”

Sakura wrinkles her nose.

She doesn’t understand why Ino, beautiful deadly Ino who can crook her finger and have people at their knees for her, would put up with a bitter boy who couldn’t understand exactly how important and vital her work is, couldn’t understand how her work _is_ what she is.

Sex, in Sakura’s experience, is more work than it’s worth.

The last thing she wants to do when she gets home from sixteen hours in surgery is to pretend that cold pawing at her breasts and five minutes of penetration does it for her.

“What’s with that face?” Ino demands.

Sakura shrugs.

“Come _on_ , Sakura. You know that multiple orgasms can excuse almost every sin.”

Shikamaru coughs on a laugh, and Ino turns on him.

“You’re a man, you couldn’t understand.”

“Oh no,” he chuckles. “I am well aware of what giving multiple orgasms can get you forgiveness for.”

Ino reaches forward and pats him on the cheek.

“Don’t worry, Temari thanked me for training you up so good.”

Sakura splutters and Shikamaru groans.

“Please don’t tell me about how you and my ex-girlfriend hooked up. The mere thought of you two together is enough, let alone the reality. No one would survive.”

“Thank you,” Ino says, sounding flattered.

Sakura isn’t sure that it was supposed to be a compliment. It’s just the truth.

Ino and Temari working together…

Sakura knows where she would stand, and it would be at their backs as they burned the Great Elemental Nations to the ground.

“Anyways,” Ino continues. “Yes, I can forgive a multitude of sins from a hook-up if the sex is good. But I was bored, and I _really_ don’t appreciate the implication that my name or my face got me my job.”

Sakura bares her teeth in sympathy, the insult of that beating at her ribcage.

Shikamaru growls.

“Don’t worry, it’s handled,” Ino assures them.

Sakura relaxes, her fists uncurling, but the fury remains, simmering in her veins.

Shikamaru’s hands release the grasp they’ve twisted in her hair and Sakura hisses at the sudden loss of tension in her scalp.

“Sorry,” he murmurs.

Sakura squeezes his knee in forgiveness.

Shikamaru doesn’t have to apologize for the impulse to find the idiot and rip him apart for shadows to feed on.

The only reason Sakura isn’t making plans is that she trusts that Ino dealt out _exactly_ what the boy deserved. (Of course, that doesn’t mean she isn’t going to make sure that his every medical appointment from now on is uncomfortable. It’s hard enough being a woman and what they are. And not every woman is Ino, capable of shattering anyone who would doubt her to pieces with little more than a touch of eye-contact and a smile.)

“You’re worth more than that, Ino,” Sakura tells her.

Ino shrugs. “I know. But I’m young and beautiful. I’ll do whatever—and whoever—I want as long as it’s fun, and when it stops being fun, I’ll move on.”

Sakura has to laugh at Ino’s eyebrow wriggle and her salacious wink.

“Not all of us are waiting around for True Love. I’ve got better things to do. True Love can catch up.”

And Sakura feels the laughter slide off her face, everything soft and lovely about the evening turning suddenly sharp.

It’s an effort of will to not curl in on herself.

“Ino,” Shikamaru barks. His hand curves around the back of Sakura’s neck, pressing apologies into her spine.

Ino sighs and stands. She shoves Sakura further onto the couch and climbs on to face her. It’s a tight fit; Ino’s hands cupping Sakura’s face, her leg thrown over Sakura’s hip, her forehead pressed to Sakura’s own.

Shikamaru huffs at the added weight of Ino’s head joining Sakura’s on his thigh, but he doesn’t move, just shifts his hand up slightly to cup Sakura’s skull and thread his fingers deeper through her hair.

“It’s supposed to be fun, Sakura. It’s not supposed to be so hard.”

Sakura breathes in Ino’s words, lets them settle in her lungs.

Maybe this time, they’ll stick, and she’ll learn how to stop loving boys who don’t know how to look at her, boys who are wounded feral things who don’t want to be healed.

(Sakura is a healer, it is in her nature, and her shishō taught her much but she never taught her how to stop.

You don’t stop until the patient is dead.

And even then…

(Sakura carries forbidden jutsu curled under her tongue.))

She wants so badly to love with Ino’s easy freedom. To flirt and bat her eyelashes and tug boys and girls into dark corners to grace them with the clever slide of her fingers and the soft press of her mouth.

Sakura wants to stop seeing Sasuke in every face she considers, his eyes burning accusation into her skin, as if her learning to let go were some kind of betrayal.

(It’s a lie her mind concocts. Sasuke has never looked at her the ways she’s wanted him to.)

Sasuke doesn’t want her. He has never wanted her.

And Sakura is not Naruto, to chase eternally after a dream of shadow and smoke and half-forgotten screams.

She’s so very tired of waiting for a boy who is never going to be able to give her back her love the way she needs him to.

(Her waiting isn’t fair to either of them.

Sasuke doesn’t know what to do with the dreams she painted, those long cold years where she was alone and teamless.

She doesn’t either, now that the possibility of them being realized is so close and never more far away.

Sasuke isn’t the boy she dreamed of pulling in her arms, pulling back to Konoha.

Maybe he never really was at all.)

“He doesn’t deserve you,” Ino says.

Sakura closes her eyes against that blue gaze: enough sharpness to rip Sakura to shreds.

Shikamaru snarls an agreement.

They don’t get it.

Sasuke is her teammate.

It’s not about deserving.

And they _should_ get that, the two of them, what teammates mean. Of all the people Sakura knows, Ino and Shikamaru should get that.

It’s not about deserving, it’s about the bonds that Konoha tied between them, the way their Village fused their souls under the heat of the Will of Fire. It’s about Sasuke and the boy he once was, the boy Sakura knew he could be.

It’s not about deserving. It’s just about Sakura and these boys she was given without understanding what it meant and no ability to keep them close, to keep them safe.

(They should get it, what teammates mean. And somedays Sakura thinks that they do, and that maybe it’s just her who doesn’t get it.

Maybe her team is broken.

Maybe it never really was.

(Maybe all it ever was was her dreams strung together with candy floss and her eyes too blurred with tears to see it.))

“This world is too hard, Sakura. It doesn’t need your help in breaking you.”

Sakura shakes.

Ino pulls her down, where she sobs into the hollow of Ino’s throat. Shikamaru’s hands trace soothing circles along the length of her back.

Ino murmurs soft nothings and presses kisses to her hairline.

“I know, sweet girl. I know. You care too much, it’s okay. We’ve got you. We’re here. You’re alright. You’ll be alright.”

It is absolution to finally cry.

She’s spent so long telling herself she doesn’t deserve to cry, that she doesn’t deserve to grieve.

But oh, she is grieving for what she has lost and what she never had.

(Maybe there is a life where Sasuke is not so broken and he loves her the way she needs to be loved.

Maybe there is a life where they are happy together. Where they are whole.

It is not this life.)

Sakura cries. Shikamaru and Ino hold her through it, until there is nothing left in her, and then they hold her a little bit longer.

Finally, all she is is stillness. After this long night, with all of its highs and lows, she has nothing left to her but peace.

It’s not fixed, nothing is fixed, but for a moment, the storm of Sakura’s emotions is still.

Sakura presses a kiss to Ino’s collarbone in thanks.

Ino pulls her up and kisses her softly on the lips, then scatters kisses across her cheeks, washing away the remnants of her tears.

Something small and scared uncurls in Sakura’s ribcage, unfolding at the silent declaration of devotion.

Ino presses a last trail of kisses along her nose, between her eyes, ending in the centre of her forehead. When she pulls away, Ino’s face is fierce and soft and beautiful.

Sakura loves her so much, this best friend who would burn the world for her, who loves her even when she is at her lowest, who believes that she is worth something, worth everything.

(There is a life where Ino never looks at Sakura and sees greatness in that small, scared girl.

It is a bleaker one that ends much too soon.)

“Bed?” Shikamaru asks, his voice low and quiet, but Sakura still startles.

She’d forgotten that he was there.

But Shikamaru is there, holding them up, watchful of the night as they lay wrapped in grief and forgiveness.

She loves him for it; his quiet and cold protection, the blood he would spill to keep them safe.

(She worries somedays for the way Shikamaru takes the responsibility for their lives in his hands, for the Village on his shoulders, the way he has since he was thirteen and Konoha was reeling from the loss of so many of its shinobi.

(Somedays she worries his care for her stems from the snarl on his face at Sasuke’s selfishness. (Shikamaru never forgave Sasuke for almost losing Chōji.) But then she’ll remember the boy who tilted his head at her when Ino shoved this unknown pink haired girl at him and invited her to play a game of shōgi, and was so patient as he taught her how to move the pieces.

He blinked once when Ami and her friends showed up to torment Sakura, Ino late to arrive to school. Blinked and said something so drawling and vicious that Ami fled in tears.))

(They don’t understand how she loves Sasuke. She doesn’t understand how they don’t understand, when what they were born to be—Ino-Shika-Chō—has made them what they are.

But here, wrapped up in them and their fierce, vicious love, she thinks she might.

(She loves Naruto and Sasuke, but she doesn’t believe that the loss of her would destroy them, that they would destroy for the loss of her.

And she wants to weep for that, but she doesn’t have the tears.))

“Yeah,” Ino agrees. “Bed. You’re staying here.”

It’s an order.

Sakura doesn’t disagree.

Ino disentangles herself from Sakura and groans as she stands, stretching out the kinks of being squished on the couch for too long.

Sakura goes to follow and squeaks when Shikamaru lifts her.

She wraps her legs around his waist and buries her face in his shoulder instead of complaining. Shikamaru’s hands flex under her thighs as he hitches her closer.

They’re quiet as they follow Ino to her bedroom.

Sakura feels strangely docile and detached, like the alcohol and her tears and the soft darkness pressing in have sloughed off layers of armour, leaving her unweighted, light enough to float away.

Shikamaru’s hands under her and his ribs expanding against her own are an anchor, lest she float away entirely.

(She’s so very tired of being strong.)

When they get to the bedroom, Ino is pulling out pyjamas for the three of them.

“For you,” she says, tossing a pair of pants for Shikamaru and an oversized top for Sakura onto the bed.

Shikamaru releases his hold on her as Sakura unwinds her legs from around him. It’s a long slide down his body.

When her feet are finally on the ground, Ino takes the elbow that Shikamaru is steadying and turns her around.

Sakura goes, and lets Ino guide her out of her clothing.

Shikamaru gently pulls the sleep shirt over her head and Ino helps her get her arms through the sleeves.

Sakura shivers at their touches: soft and intimate and undemanding.

Ino’s eyes track the shiver and her hands—smoothing the shirt down Sakura’s torso—pause at her hips and tighten. Sakura leans into her when Ino tugs, something caught in her lungs.

Shikamaru brings a hand up to brace her lower back.

Sakura watches Ino’s eyes dart down to her mouth, then back up to look at her.

“Sakura?” she asks.

Sakura doesn’t understand the question.

“Hmm?”

Ino tilts her head. “I’m going to kiss you now. Unless you don’t want me to.”

Sakura blinks. “Why?”

(Why should Ino want to kiss her, when Sakura is simply Sakura and not worth it?)

(Why would Sakura ever say no?)

“Because I want to take care of you. Because I think you need taking care of tonight. So, can I kiss you?”

Sakura drops her head back onto Shikamaru’s chest to offer her lips up to Ino, her eyes fluttering close.

Ino’s hands are brands where they cup Sakura’s jaw, but her mouth is benediction.

Sakura opens under her touch, blooming, and Ino sweeps into her, sweeps her away.

Ino kisses her and kisses her and kisses her, until there is nothing left of Sakura but the places Ino has touched.

She whimpers when Ino pulls away, but Shikamaru is there, hovering.

“Sakura?” he breathes.

And Sakura can’t answer but she can reach for him, threading her fingers through his hair to pull him down to her.

If Ino is a flood then Shikamaru is wildfire.

Under both of them she is destroyed.

Shikamaru bears her backwards until she blinks and suddenly she is spread across Ino’s bed, Shikamaru holding himself over her as he kisses her and kisses her and kissed her.

Ino says something, the words not registering as Sakura is unmade, but Shikamaru rumbles out an agreement, and then he is trailing kisses down her neck, stopping to suck bruises into the skin behind her ear, at the hollow of her throat. When he hits the neckline of the shirt, Sakura almost laughs at the disgruntled sound he makes, except that then Shikamaru is laving her nipple through her shirt with the broad swath of his tongue and she is gasping.

Ino catches her hands when she reaches for him.

“We’re going to make you feel good. Do you want that, Sakura? Do you want us?”

Sakura nods, squeezing Ino’s hands.

“That’s not good enough, Sakura, I need you to use your words.”

Shikamaru stops and perches his chin on her sternum to look up at her, to watch her with his dark burning eyes.

Sakura gasps and tries to find the words.

This isn’t— This isn’t what she expected. She doesn’t know how they got here. But she knows that she trusts them, that she _loves_ them, and maybe it isn’t the way she thought you should love somebody to trust them with your body, but she has trusted Ino and Shikamaru with more than this, with more than her pleasure, trusted them with her life and heart and her soul. This isn’t what she expected, but she wants this, wants this stolen night where they love her and give her back something she didn’t know she had lost.

“Please,” Sakura finally rasps out. Please, gods, but she wants to be loved.

Ino kisses one palm, then the other. “Good girl. Thank you, Sakura, we’re going to make this so good for you.”

Sakura nods, desperately. “Please,” she says again, the words spilling out of her now that she’s managed to speak past the wanting and the grief that chokes her throat. “Please, Ino, please please please. Shika, I want— please. More, I need—”

“We’ve got you,” Ino reassures her. “Just trust us, Sakura. We’ve got you.”

Sakura trusts those blue eyes, so steady on her own. Trusts the hands holding her, their familiar callouses.

“Shika,” Ino says, and Shikamaru must hear something in that, because he smiles, a delighted feral thing that Sakura doesn’t recognize, and sucks.

Sakura jerks, almost coming off the bed but for the hands holding her hips, the eyes holding her own.

After that it’s Shikamaru’s mouth on her breasts, bare at some point, though Sakura doesn’t remember losing her shirt. It’s Ino biting across her stomach, soothing the hurt with her tongue, and then lower still. It’s moans falling out of her mouth and words of endearment that make Sakura thrash, her toes curl, shame wrapped in pleasure, because “baby girl” and “sweetheart” and “beautiful” shouldn’t break her heart the way they do, shouldn’t put her back together.

At some point, Sakura must end up sitting against Shikamaru’s chest, his back against the wall, because Ino is saying “Shika, her hands.” and Shikamaru is trailing his fingers down her arms until they wrap lightly around her wrists, his form solid and warm underneath her.

“Sakura,” he murmurs, a question. “Say the word and I’ll let go.”

She can’t breathe, doesn’t have words, and so her fingers slide into the hand signal for “understood”.

Shikamaru’s fingers flex ever so slightly, and he presses more kisses against her neck in praise.

Ino stares up at them where she’s been worrying bruises into the soft skin at the inside of Sakura’s thighs. She pins Sakura with her eyes, dares her to look away, and Sakura can’t, could never, Ino too beautiful for words as she licks a broad stripe along Sakura’s labia majora, up to flick at her clitoris.

Sakura whines, the sound echoing at the back of her throat, and Ino does it again.

She pulls back for a moment to smile wickedly, and then she brings her hand up and Sakura looses herself to sensation, doesn’t bother trying to quantify the feelings, just _feels_.

It’s tongue and the slightest edge of teeth and Ino’s clever fingers, with Shikamaru’s grip around her wrists an anchor in the storm as Sakura feels herself coil tighter and tighter, pleasure running electric through her veins. Her head tosses against Shikamaru’s chest as she fights whatever it is that is building in her, something sharp and warm and foreign and so, so good.

“That’s it, you’re doing so good beautiful,” Shikamaru tells her. He’s shifted both wrists to one hand, his other tracing soothing lines along her sides.

Sakura could pull away, but she lets him hold her still. She moans, caught between falling over the edge Ino is pushing her towards and running away.

She could pull away or say stop or freeze, and they would let her run.

But she doesn’t.

Sakura shudders, and lets herself feel, lets herself writhe and chase that unknown peak.

“That’s it, there you go.”

"I can't," Sakura sobs, "I can't, I can’t. I don’t—” She doesn’t know how to let go, and it hurts, this wanting and not having.

"Shh, sweetheart," Shikamaru's croons in her ear. The long sweeping circles he's drawing across her ribs are a soft counterpart to Ino's tongue on her clit.

Sakura shakes her head, her damp hair catching on the planes of his chest. "I can't."

“Yes, you can," Shikamaru's insists, and Ino punctuates his reassurance with a particularly vicious twist of her fingers. 

Unthinking, Sakura's hips buck, seeking more, seeking to get away, she doesn't know. It's too much and not enough and everything.

Shikamaru's hand, the one not holding her wrists pinned, slips down to press hot and heavy on her stomach, just above her mons, forcing her hips to still. 

Ino does it again, three fingers deep, scissoring as she presses in further.

Sakura yelps and her thighs spasm, tightening around Ino's golden head even as she tries to pull away.

Ino's gaze flashes up, blue eyes trapping Sakura, washing away the last of the self-doubt and the fear. Ino’s gaze on her makes Sakura feel invincible.

Again, she presses in, and Shikamaru holds her steady, holds her still as she shakes. 

"Ino," Sakura mumbles, "fuck, I don’t— please—“

Ino laughs, and the sound vibrates through Sakura.

She moans, teetering on a precipice.

“Come for us, Sakura,” Shikamaru orders.

Ino twists her fingers and presses her tongue flat against Sakura’s clit.

Sakura falls.

And all there is is light.

Ino and Shikamaru ease her through it, soft touches and words, until Sakura is an exhausted, sated mess.

She watches with half-closed eyes, curled on her side, her chin perched on a hand, as Ino rides Shikamaru.

They’re gorgeous to watch: the long golden fall of Ino’s hair catching what little light echoes through the room; Shikamaru’s hands dwarfing Ino’s waist; the stretch of Shikamaru’s neck as his head drops back and the bruises Ino puts there; the way they kiss like devouring, like two parts of a whole.

Sakura tucks away the sounds they make somewhere safe for her to keep.

After, when they’ve cleaned up and Ino’s made them all drink a glass of water and they’re tumbled together under the covers, falling asleep, Sakura murmurs “thank you.”

“Oh, Sakura,” Ino laughs, and kisses her chin. “No. No thanks needed. Not for that. That was a pleasure.”

Shikamaru makes a sleepy sound of agreement and buries his face in the back of Sakura’s neck.

They fall asleep surrounding her, but Sakura clings to wakefulness. She doesn’t want to fall into dreams and wake to the end of this.

Not yet.

She lets Ino and Shikamaru wrap around her, keeping her safe, for just a little while longer.

(Shinobi live short and painful lives. They take what they can, when they can.)

When dawn breaks, this will be just one more thing they’ve shared in the night.

Sakura doesn’t love them the way she thought you needed to love a person to share this.

But she loves them.

And more than that, they love her.

(They’d burn the world for her, but most of all, they’ll hold her tight.

She doesn’t ever want the world to burn for her, but oh, does Sakura want to be loved, be wanted.

Hands curl against the bruises they’ve left on her hipbones.

It is enough, for now.

(She is enough.

Maybe one day she’ll believe it.))

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was written in answer to an ask about a tag at the bottom of a kakasaku week 2016 fic. There is absolutely no need to read [with friends like these](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10726482/chapters/23769807), but the gist is that at some point Sakura has a threesome with Ino and Shikamaru, which is why Ino definitely knows what Sakura looks like the morning after she's had good sex.


	5. from very far away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sakura runs. ino waits. sometimes, you just have to let old wounds to heal. sometimes, you have to learn forgiveness. (sometimes, there is no forgiving.) post-fourth war

“This is a terrible plan,” Ino says. Again.

Sakura has lost count of how many times Ino has told her this she disagrees with what Sakura is about to do.

Sakura sighs. She’s just so tired.

“I know, Ino. You’ve made yourself clear.”

“But you’re going to do it anyways.” Ino nods, her jaw clenched. She’s furious and fierce.

Sakura aches with it.

“You could try and make this easier.”

Ino laughs, a brittle thing. “Someone has to tell you when you’re being an idiot, and since your team won’t…”

Sakura flinches at that.

The reminder is harsh.

She doesn’t need it.

She hurts enough as it is.

“Thanks Ino. You’re a great friend.” Sakura doesn’t mean for it to come out so caustic: sharp edged poison that Ino doesn’t deserve. Not really. None of this is about Ino, really, but for the way that Ino fighting for her makes her want to cry.

“Fuck you,” Ino snaps back.

It’s Sakura’s turn to laugh.

“Yeah, okay. Thanks for the goodbye. Really raised my spirits. This has been fun. But I’m going to go now, so. See you, Ino. Whenever.”

Sakura hoists her pack and turns to leave through the gates.

“Sakura…” Ino sighs.

Sakura stops, looking upwards as she blinks back tears.

“I’m just— You shouldn’t have to leave so that you can feel safe. That’s fucking bullshit. He shouldn’t be allowed to chase you away from home.”

“It’s my choice,” Sakura reminds her. “No one is making me.”

“No, but they sure as hell aren’t giving you a better choice!”

“It’s not Sasuke’s fault I can’t bare to look at him, Ino.”

Ino laughs again.

They do so much laughing that rings hollow, too coated with bitterness to be anything happy. They never used to laugh like this.

(Sakura aches with the half-forgotten echoes of Ino’s giggles, with all that they have lost and sacrificed.)

“Right. He’s never done anything wrong in his life and you’re just being irrational. I’m sure. Stop making excuses for him Sakura, that’s what got you into this mess. People excusing Uchiha Sasuke’s actions and never holding him accountable for the harm he’s caused.”

Sakura swallows. “He’s trying.”

“Yeah. I’m sure. Has he bothered apologizing yet? For any of it? If he has, I sure haven’t gotten mine yet.”

Gods, but Sakura hates her a little bit.

Ino has always been so good at making Sakura look at what she doesn’t want to see.

“He’s trying,” Sakura repeats.

“Nice. I’m taking that to mean that he hasn’t. Does he even think he should be apologizing? He’s not the only person that lost everything, not even close, and you don’t see anyone else doing what he’s done.”

“Why are you doing this, Ino? Can’t you just say goodbye and wish me safe travels?” Sakura begs.

She doesn’t want to talk about this.

She doesn’t want to talk about Sasuke.

She’s sick and tired of talking about Sasuke.

She just wants to be somewhere that he isn’t everywhere: in the corner of her eye, in the back of her mind, a constant haunting shadow.

She just wants to be free of him.

“I’m not letting you do this without a fight! He should be the one to leave, not you! No one wants him here!”

Sakura finally whirls around.

“The Council wants him here! The Kages want him here.” And then, of course, most importantly. “Naruto wants him here!”

And fuck.  _Fuck_. She’s crying.

She hates that she cries.

She’s just so angry.

Angry about everything.

She can’t remember the last time she wasn’t angry.

She thinks that it must have been before the chūnin exams. Before everything.

Maybe she’s just always been angry.

Angry at the world, but mostly just angry at herself.

Useless, weak, stupid, annoying girl who just always fucking cries.

“So I’m leaving. Because one of us needs to, and the Village isn’t willing to lose Sasuke.”

“Fuck the Uchiha,” Ino snarls. “We don’t need them. We need  _you_ , Sakura. Not some broken boy who thinks he deserves vengeance because of his name or his crappy dōjustu.”

Sakura wants to smile for that, but it feels too much like a lie. Like an appeasement.

She knows what she’s worth.

“He’s trying. He deserves to be happy.”

She believes it.

“ _You_  deserve to be happy.”

Sakura nods, and wipes at her tears. “I know. That’s why I’m leaving.”

Ino clenches her hands and looks away, staring off into the distance.

They’re quiet, the anger and hurt bleeding away.

“Fine,” Ino finally says. “ _Fine_. Go. But you better come back, you hear me?”

“I won’t be gone forever,” Sakura promises. “And besides, I’m sure we’ll see each other. It’s not like I’m going to hide in some far off cave and become a hermit or, worse, retreat into the Shikkotsu Forest, never to be seen again. It’s just Suna.”

“You better write.”

“Yeah, Ino, I’ll write. If I’m not too busy.”

“Even if you’re busy. Or I’ll make Temari send me regular updates.”

Sakura roles her eyes.

It only feels a little forced, the levity.

“Okay, okay. Even if I’m busy.”

Ino nods firmly.

They stand for a moment, just staring at each other.

Sakura drinks in the way Ino’s bangs fall across her eye, the white of her teeth against her lip as she gnaws at it in thought, the set of her chin.

Gods, but she’s going to miss her.

Suddenly, Ino lunges forward, pulling Sakura into a hug.

She goes, banding her arms around Ino’s back.

She wants to impress the memory of the way Ino curves around her into her bones until it is a part of her.

Ino tucks her face into the crook of Sakura’s neck.

Sakura doesn’t comment on the tears that pool there as they cling together. She just twists her fingers tighter into Ino’s shirt, just holds her tighter.

An eternity passes as they hold on.

But Sakura can’t stay.

She needs to go.

Reluctantly, she pulls away.

Ino’s eyes are red-rimmed and all the more blue for it.

Sakura can feel the void in her chest gaping open, threatening to implode her lungs.

She can barely draw breath.

“Okay,” she finally croaks. “Okay. I have to go.”

“Right.”

They stare at each other hopelessly.

“Bye, Ino.”

“Goodbye, Sakura.”

Sakura closes her eyes and spins away.

She opens them, but she doesn’t dare look back.

It’s all too easy to picture Ino standing there, a small figure dwarfed by the gates.

She doesn’t want her last memory of Ino to be Ino small.

 

 

 

Sakura takes her time.

There is no rush. She’s expected, but not on any particular date.

This isn’t a mission; it’s an invitation of sorts.

A hand reaching out in sympathy, perhaps.

Sakura just never would have expected the gesture from the Kazekage of all people. She respects him, but they’ve never been friends.

Gaara is one of Naruto’s people though, and maybe that is enough.

Whatever his reasons, Sakura is thankful for somewhere to go.

She was dying a slow death in Konoha.

The desert will be a good change.

(She doesn’t think of how the Kazekage has forbidden Sasuke’s presence in Suna. He’d accepted Naruto’s plea for mercy, but that was all.

The Uchiha are not welcome in Wind.

They aren’t welcome in most places these days.)

Sakura has never taken the route to Suna slowly. Every time she’s been it has been a desperate rush towards some uncertain danger.

She takes her time and enjoys the transition as the Shodai’s forest gives away to smaller trees and then scrubland before finally the desert stretches out ahead of her.

It’s night by the time she reaches that last, nigh imperceptible line where the forest has finally faded behind her and all that is left is the impossible kiss of the moonlight along the horizon.

Sakura stops and just breathes.

It’s quiet.

So quiet.

And the stars are so, so bright.

Sakura keeps her head tilted back and her eyes open until they start to prick with pain. The tears pull the stars to silver smears.

Sakura lets herself stand on the edge of the desert, lets herself fall to her knees, lets herself weep, lets the stars and the quiet night swallow up her grief and her rage.

She just so fucking tired.

Konoha and everything she’s left behind presses down on her back, bowing her forehead to the ground.

Sakura gasps.

She can’t breathe.

It’s too much.

She can’t—

She shrugs her pack off, and still, the weight doesn’t abate.

It’s in her ribcage, making each breath an impossible fight.

She doesn’t—

It was never-

Sakura kneels at the edge of the desert, her forehead pressed to the sand, opens her mouth, and screams.

Like everything else, like blood and sweat and tears, the sands soak up the sound of it, razor wire and acid and all the soft-worn edges of the dreams she once dared dream when she was young and foolish and thought that happy endings were something you could reach if you just ran hard enough, far enough, if you just didn’t give up.

Like everything else, the sands soak up Haruno Sakura’s heartbreak, and scour her clean.

 

 

 

The Godaime Kazekage looks out from the walls of his village—a silent pillar in the false dawn—watchful and waiting.

When he lifts her up and over, the first rays spill over the far edge of the horizon, pressing blessings on her.

Her pink hair flares like wildfire under the light, a burning halo around a face too young to carry the lines of grief.

“Be welcome, Haruno Sakura of the Leaf,” he blesses her, finger streaking a line of oil across her forehead. “Put down your burdens and find peace while you remain with us.”

Once, he would have torn her apart for the fragile cracks she carries behind too-green eyes. Today, Gaara wants to weep, because Naruto taught him that love was not a burden, and yet here she stands, her shoulders stooped, and but gods, Gaara never needed any more proof that the world is not kind.

(Gaara looks at her and cannot help but wonder if his mother carried the same weight of grief as her love turned to poison and killed her.)

 

 

 

“They want me to marry him,” Sakura says.

The midday sun burns down on them as they catch their breaths at the edge of a training field.

It’s too hot to be out, let alone sparring, but Sakura was feeling restless and Temari had gotten fed up with her pacing and decided that now was as good a time as any for them to finally have that match they’d been threatening one another with.

Sakura nurses the lacerations along her forearms as Temari drinks in that statement.

“That Council of yours?” she finally asks, something vicious and knowing caught at the back of her throat.

“Not my Council,” Sakura argues.

Somedays, she wishes Tsunade-shishō had gone through with the plans she made when she was at her drunkest and most furious, Shizune’s hasty fūnjustu seals and the ANBU team’s loyalty the only thing keeping the three of them from being tried for treason or, more likely, a quiet death at the hands of some ROOT agent.

Somedays, Sakura wishes that Tsunade-shishō had given her the order—the familiar order that Sakura will swear to her dying day she never once received in her life—and that Sakura had again slipped a gentle hand across a passing withered forearm, and one more sad but unsurprising heart attack took the life of a respected elder.

The old ways are dying.

The old ways should already be dead.

Tamara looks at Sakura from under her lashes. “You know, if you ever need any pointers for dealing with old men who think they know better than you how your country should be run…”

Sakura thinks about the rumours that Konoha received about Suna in those first two turbulent years after the Sarutobi Hiruzen’s death.

Sakura thinks about the whispers and reports and orders she heard as she worked industriously in a corner of the Hokage’s office.

Sakura thinks about the way Sabaku no Gaara went from Sand’s barely leashed monster to its beloved Kage, his siblings at his side.

She almost wants to ask what they do with bodies in the desert.

Sakura smiles. It’s only mostly forced and a little bitter. “I’m just a second-generation shinobi from a minor merchant clan,” she says.

“You’re the Godaime Hokage’s apprentice,” Temari counters.

Sakura laughs. “A medic.”

“And you’re a member of Team Seven.”

“No,” Sakura laughs again. “I’m the Girl. I’m the Baggage. I was there to round out the fucking numbers.”

Temari whirls finally and grabs Sakura by the chin, forcing her gaze up. “You’re not alone, Sakura.”

Sakura’s chin wobbles. “I’m here, Temari, because Naruto thought the Council had the right idea.”

 

 

 

_Sakura_ , reads the note with the package,  _Kiba asked you to hold on to this for him. He says you can bring it back when you’re ready._

_I suggest you stay away as long as possible._

_He doesn’t deserve it back._

_Do me the favour of distracting Kankuro long enough that Shikamaru and Temari can go on an actual date? I don’t want to be stuck with a miserable teammate if he comes back without getting some. Shika, despite all claims to the contrary, is a pissy bitch when he’s pining._

_I don’t miss you,_

_Ino_

Sakura opens up the package, bemused.

And she has to laugh when she scrapes the packing peanuts aside and finds Naruto’s fucking frog money purse.

It isn’t a kind laugh.

Shikamaru grins back at her, more bared teeth than anything else.

Later, when Sakura goes to get rid of the box, she finds a pressed flower at the bottom.

When she closes her eyes and brings it to her nose, she can almost see the shape of Ino’s smile.

 

 

 

Gaara closes the file and looks up at her from behind her desk.

“This is excellent work, Sakura-san,” he compliments.

Sakura nods. It is. “Kankuro and your puppetry corps have been invaluable. I’ve been playing with prosthetics before, but the fine-tuning we’ve been able to develop using chakra strings is incredible, really. I’m worried about the necessary chakra control and how that will limit the application to shinobi only, but we’ve some interesting ideas concerning robotics.”

Gaara looks at her for a long moment.

“Many people still remember how you came to our aide when the Akatsuki attacked,” he says. “Many people still remember that it was Haruno Sakura who saved my brother’s life and Haruno Sakrua who killed Akasuno no Sasori. You will always be welcome in this village. You will always be welcome to stay, Sakura-san.”

Sakura clenches her jaw. “Can I sit?” she asks.

Gaara nods.

Sakura sits.

“What about Naruto?” she asks the bookshelves behind him.

“Naruto will always be my friend,” Gaara says. “But it is not Uzumaki Naruto to whom Sand owes a debt. And—” he pauses.

Green eyes catch green eyes.

Sakura doesn’t look away.

“And,” Gaara continues. “I like to think that you are my friend as well, Sakura-san.”

Sakura stares at the man across from her, the faintest of blushes dusting across his cheeks, and she remembers suddenly that he’s not much more than a boy.

He’s so young, still.

They all are.

“Gaara,” she smiles, “my friends just call me Sakura,”

He smiles back. “Sakura, you will always be welcome here.”

“I know,” she says. “But I can’t run forever.”

Gaara tilts his head. “No, perhaps not. But you can always come back, if you ever need to.”

“I still haven’t had the chance to explore all the greenhouses yet.”

“I have some time yet, would you like a tour?”

 

 

 

“I learned,” Gaara says as he trims the spiky desert plant before him, “that not all things can be forgiven.”

Sakura stills.

“There is blood on my hands that will never wash away,” he continues, untroubled. “But that doesn’t mean that everyday I don’t get up and try a little bit longer to maybe make up for all of the hurt I caused.”

“You were a child,” Sakura says.

Gaara smiles at her.

It’s a soft thing, worn smooth by the years.

“Yes,” he says, “but that does not mean I am not responsible. I learned a long time ago now, that I could choose to be something other than what they tried to make me.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because somedays Temari still flinches if I move too fast. Because Kankuro can’t sleep some nights for the nightmares. Because there are too many graves filled with my people, and I’m the one who put them there. Because I have been forgiven, but that does not ever mean I, or anyone else, can forget what I’ve done.”

Gaara touches her elbow.

He’s so gentle, and yet she struggles not to wince.

“It wasn’t a crime to love him, Sakura. It was one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen. And it isn’t a crime that you can’t bare to look at him anymore. Not being able to forgive someone who doesn’t even understand how they have done the unforgivable isn’t a weakness. I think the only person you need to forgive is yourself.”

Gaara turns back to the plants.

Sakura tilts her head back, and breathes.

Then she gets her hands dirty and loses herself in the quiet respiration of growing things.

 

 

 

_Sakura,_

_Tenten and I went shopping._

_Never again._

_I mean, okay, yeah, I’m bringing her along every time I need to replace my kunai from here on out, but apparently there’s a reason she’s been banned from two separate dress shops?_

_Chōji’s on a mission though, so I had to make do._

_Also, like, my best friend isn’t around, so._

_By the way, remind me that Shika owes me a new pair of shoes for not killing the fucking Hyūga contingent at the last meeting. If those pale eyed pricks don’t stop making passive aggressive remarks about “proper clan head attire”, I’m going to make sure they can never buy a properly fitted piece of clothing in this village ever again._

_Sai’s being weird and needy. Write the poor boy a letter, I think he misses you._

_Ino_

The envelop holds half-crushed purple petals.

They smell like being girls again, and giggling under Ino’s blankets in the night.

 

 

 

Sakura really shouldn’t be surprised when Sai shows up, escorting a shipment of flowers.

“Flowers?” Sakura asks. “In the middle of the desert.”

Sai shrugs. “Apparently, according to Kakashi-sama, I was requested personally. The flowers are a special order for a wedding.”

Sakura purses her lips. “Right. I’m sure.”

“I come with gifts. I am aware that it is traditional to bring a gift for your host.”

“Sai”—Sakura rolls her eyes—“ _I’m_  a guest.”

Sai blinks at her. “But I am staying with you.”

“We’re both staying in guest accommodations. Did you bring something for the Kazekage?”

Sai blinks again. “Do you think he would like these socks?”

They’re very terrible green things.

They’re also Naruto’s favourite pair.

“You know,” Sakura says, “I think that he might just.”

 

 

 

Gaara’s robes are long, but Sakura later swears to Sai as he’s leaving that she saw a brief peak of green.

 

 

 

_Sakura,_

_The cherry trees are blooming._

_I know you hate it, so I guess you’re happy to be sweltering in the desert._

_I’m going to kill your sensei, by the way. I spent three weeks in Iwa during the snow melt._

_I’m never going to get the scent of rotted grass out of my nose and I ruined my boots in the slush._

_Ask Gaara if he’ll shelter me when I murder our Hokage and have to flee the country._

_Ino_

The disturbingly accurate doodle of Kakashi-sensei with his head separated from his neck, the mask still on, makes Sakura laugh.

She tucks the sakura blossoms into a book on the nightshade family.

 

 

 

“C’mon, Sakura-chan,” Kankuro had whined. “It’s just a little mission. It’ll be fun!”

Sakura stands surrounded by bodies, blood and viscera dripping from her arms, panting.

“Just a little fucking raiding group, huh?” she demands of the dust strewn air. “Just a quick trip? I’m going to kill him. Gaara likes me better, he’ll forgive me.”

“He does like you better,” Kankuro grouses as he stomps back into the main cavern. “I’d tell you to marry him, because you might be one of the only people he likes enough to marry, but then I’d be stuck with you forever.”

Sakura glares at him. “I just saved your life. Again.”

“I had it handled!”

Sakura’s glare intensifies.

“You almost got a spike wider than your head through your thoracic cavity.”

“Yeah,” Kankuro says, “about that… Can we just, maybe not mention that bit to my siblings?”

Sakura considers him for a moment.

“What are you going to give me in exchange for my silence?”

 

 

 

“So,” Temari says once Sakura’s been deposited in her chair. “You going to tell me what Kankuro doesn’t want you to tell me bad enough that he’s willing to carry one around on his back for the past four days?”

“Nope!” Sakura declares, and pops another date into her mouth.

Temari stares at her.

“Alright,” she says, “what do you want in exchange for the information?”

 

 

 

“Sakura,” Gaara sighs, pinching his nose, “please explain to me why I’ve just gotten a politely worded request from the Hokage to return his advisor since, I quote, ‘someone needs to do the paperwork around here and it isn’t going to be me, and Naruto is really bad at it’?”

Sakura blinks and smiles with just a touch of confusion. “I’m sure I have no idea, Kazekage-sama.”

Gaara sighs again.

 

 

 

_Sakura,_

_You bitch, I was going to be Best Man at their wedding. I fought Chōji for it and won fair and square._

_Also, I can’t believe that Shikamaru is married._

_If he moves permanently to Sand too, I’m bringing Chōji and coming too._

_Warn Gaara._

_It’s a promise._

_Ino_

_PS. Naruto still hasn’t stopped whining about his wrist hurting from all the paperwork he’s had to do. Also, Kakashi-sensei is looking particularly wild about the eyes. Just thought you’d like an update on how the Hokage office is running without some of their best and brightest there to handle everything for them!_

There are no flowers.

Sakura pretends that she doesn’t keep shaking the envelope, as if they might somehow appear.

 

 

 

“You’re moping,” Temari accuses. “Stop it. It’s giving me hives.”

“I’m not moping,” Sakura snaps back. “You’re just disgustingly happy at the moment and everyone else just looks depressed in comparison.”

Temari rolls her eyes. “A. Yes, I am disgustingly happy, thank you. You see, Shika just does this thing with his tongue and—”

“Stop!” Sakura orders, trying to clamp her hand around Temari’s mouth. “Nope. I don’t want to know. Please stop. I want to be able to still look Shikamaru in the eye.”

Temari fights her off. “Are you sure? Because, like—”

“Yes! I’m sure! Please stop.”

“Alright,” Temari says, “but I think you’re missing out. Trust me, Sakura, get you a guy—or girl—who knows what to do with their tongue.”

“Thank you, Temari.”

“Anyways. Don’t think you can distract me. You’re moping. What’s up?”

“It’s nothing,” Sakura insists. “I’m not moping.”

Temari stares her down. “Ok. If you say so.”

“She’s moping,” Kankuro agrees, throwing his arms around their shoulders as he comes up behind them.

Sakura goes to elbow him in the gut, but he dodges.

“I think she’s pining.”

“I’m not pining.”

“Yup,” Kankuro continues, undeterred. “She’s fallen in love with our little brother but knows that an inter-Village relationship will never work. So she’s breaking her own heart before the distance can break it for her.”

“Kankuro,” Temari croons, “I know where you sleep.”

“I can’t believe you eloped!” he yells.

Again.

For the fourth time in two days.

Sakura slips away, and leaves the siblings to their argument.

She isn’t pining.

It’s stupid anyway.

You can’t fall in love with someone who is so very far away.

 

 

 

_Sakura,_

_The pining is worse._

_At least with Shikamaru back, Naruto has stopped whining. Mostly._

_Also, apparently Shikamaru is ever more petty when he’s pining for his wife and not his girlfriend, and you know how delightfully diabolical he can be when he’s feeling petty._

Operation: Cupcakes and Unicorns _is finally a go. It’s been nine years. I bet Ami thought I had forgotten._

_Ino_

Sakura has no memory of  _Operation: Cupcakes and Unicorns_  but she feels kind of bad. Ten year old Sakura and Ino were really creative.

(There are flowers again this time. Poisonous. Sakura puts them in a vase on her bedside table.)

 

 

 

“And how are you today, Sakura-sama,” the fruit seller asks.

Sakura looks up from where she’s inspecting peaches and smiles. “I had a very productive morning in the lab, Obaa-san. How are you, this afternoon? Has Isamu-chan gotten over her cold?”

“Yes!” the little woman enthuses. “That tea you sent over cleared the congestion right up! And Isamu-chan made you a card, in thanks.”

“Oh!” Sakura exclaims as she accepts a brightly coloured piece of construction paper that’s been decorated in a delightfully enthusiastic number of stickers. “Wow! This is amazing! I’ll have to make sure I tell Isamu-chan what an excellent artist she is when I see her next.”

The fruit seller beams.

They trade more pleasantries before Sakura walks off with her peaches, closing the old woman’s fingers over the money.

“No, Obaa-san, I insist. Please. Helping Isamu-chan was a duty, and a pleasure.”

She hums under her breath as she slides through the crowded market streets, colour every where, greeting people as she goes.

Sakura loves it here. Loves the smells and the heat and the people.

She thinks she could be happy here.

She  _is_  happy here.

But the soles of her feet are beginning to itch, and the forest is calling.

It’s almost time to go home.

It’s almost time to face her past and the choices she’s made, and the choices she’s going to make.

She’ll be back, one day. Sakura just needs to figure out if it will be permanent.

She can’t keep running.

(Even Tsunade-shishō came home, in the end.)

 

 

 

_Sakura_ , reads the note the hawk brings.  _It’s time to come home_.

The pale blue starflower says “courage, dear heart”.

 

 

 

“You will always be welcome here, Haruno Sakura of the Leaf,” Gaara promises.

“I know,” she says as she prepares to leap from the walls.

The desert stretches out ahead of her.

“I’ll see you soon,” she promises back. “And I will never forget what you have done for me.”

“It was only a little grain against the balance of our debt to you.”

“There are no debts between friends, Gaara,” Sakura smiles.

She’s still smiling as she plummets.

She looks back once to see the small figures atop the wall waving.

Sakura waves back.

It’s not hard to turn back around and keep moving forward.

She’s tired of running.

Ino was right.

It’s time to go home.

 

 

 

“Sakura-chan,” Naruto greets her when she walks through the gates.

She wonders how long he’s been waiting for her.

“Naruto,” she says.

He smiles, but it’s a tarnished thing.

They stand in silence, just looking at each other.

It’s awkward.

She hates that it’s awkward.

“I’m—” Naruto starts.

“I had to go,” Sakura interrupts him. “It wasn’t fair for you to ask me to stay.”

Her voice is firm.

Her heart wavers.

He looks tired.

Naruto breathes out, a long exhalation, and looks down, hand coming up to rub at the back of his head.

“I know. But I just—” he laughs.

It isn’t a happy thing.

Sakura refuses to wince.

“I just wanted things to go back. I just wanted us to be a team again.”

Sakura closes her eyes and wills the ache away.

“I don’t want to go back,” she finally says.

It feels like a summer thunderstorm, to finally say it.

“I don’t want to go back,” she repeats, stronger this time. “I don’t want to go back to being that girl. I fought too hard to become what I am, Naruto. I grew up.”

“I just wanted you to be happy,” Naruto says.

Sakura bites her lip and shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “You wanted me to be that girl you remember. You wanted to erase everything, to pretend like it all didn’t happen. But Naruto”—her voice cracks—“it did happen. And I refuse to obliterate myself so that Sasuke doesn’t have to repent for what he’s done.”

Naruto flinches like she’s struck him.

“That’s not—”

“Yes,” she says, refusing to back down, refusing to feel guilty. “That’s exactly what you were going to ask of me. And I  _refuse_. I’m not his repentance. I’m not his absolution. I’m my own godsdamned person, Naruto. I refuse to be something I’m not. Not ever again.”

He’s crying.

Sakura clenches her jaw and doesn’t reach out to soothe him.

“We’re never going to be what we were again, Naruto. That team that you remember so fondly? I don’t want it back. Not even if it meant we could forget what Sasuke has done.” She nods. “I deserve more than being just the girl or the love interest or some fucking consolation prize.”

“You aren’t—”

“You’re right. I’m not. And I refuse to ever let anyone make me into that ever again.”

“But we were a team,” Naruto whispers.

Sakura smiles, a tired cracked thing.

“No,” she says, “you two were a team. I was just the girl, and that meant I was deadweight to be cut loose when it became too much to keep carrying me.”

Finally she relents, and walks forward to cup his cheek.

“I don’t blame you for that, Naruto. But if we were a team, if you cared about me the way you care about Sasuke, you would have never asked me to give up all that I have become to be that girl again, like somehow loving Uchiha Sasuke was enough to make up for all the hurt he’s caused.”

“Sakura!”

Sakura kisses him on the cheek, soft and sad, and walks away.

There’s someone she needs to see.

 

 

 

“I’m not going to marry you.”

Sasuke makes no outward motion that she’s startled him, but she can practically smell the adrenaline spiking in his veins.

“Hn.”

Sakura smiles tightly.

“Yes, well, thank you for that desperate pledge of your undying love, but I’m still going to have to refuse. I’ll see you around, Sasuke.”

His voice stops her as she turns to leave the clearing where he’s been training.

“I never asked for the Council to try to make you do it,” he says. “I never asked anything of them.”

Sakura clenches her hands.

“Maybe not,” Sakura answers, “but you sure as hell were willing to stand by and reap the benefits of them making me.”

He doesn’t say anything.

Sakura barks out a laughter. “Yeah. That’s what I fucking thought. You know, Sasuke, people might not hate you quite so much if you actually admitted for once in your godsdamned life that you made a fucking mistake.”

“I don’t owe this village anything,” he snarls.

Sakura looks over her shoulder at him.

His face is twisted up in a rictus of hatred and for a terrible moment she freezes, the memory of the sound of lightning screaming in her ears.

But she still smells of the desert sun, and Sakura knows exactly how much force she holds in her hands.

“Maybe not,” Sakura says as she looks at the last lean shadows of the Uchiha clan. “But I thought maybe you still had a shred of fucking decency in you, maybe a shred of fucking hope.”

She starts walking away again.

“For Naruto’s sake,” she calls over her shoulder, “I hope you at least learn to ask forgiveness from your fucking self.”

Sakura doesn’t look back.

She trusts herself and her abilities enough to know she can handle leaving Sasuke at her back.

She doesn’t trust him, maybe never again, but Sakura is not Naruto, is not her shishō.

She’ll put her teammate in the ground if it comes to that.

 

 

 

“Hi,” Sakura says.

She feels every layer of dust coating her skin.

Ino’s eyes are wide.

Sakura sinks into her embrace as Ino tugs her forward, pressing her face into the crook of Sakura’s neck.

“You’re home,” Ino breathes into her skin, uncaring of the grime now sticking to them both.

“Yeah,” Sakura murmurs into Ino’s hair, her arms too tight around Ino’s back. “I’m home.”

 

 

 

“Alright, you’re paperwork is all sorted, is there anything else you need to submit to me before we finish?” Kakashi-sensei asks her.

“I’ve the last of the results of the medical research I was doing to hand over to Shizune, but that’s it for you, Hokage-sama.”

“Sakura-chan,” Kakashi-sensei scolds. “How many times do I have to tell you that Kakashi is just fine.”

“At least once more, Hokage-sama,” Sakura says, her smile only a little tight.

Kakashi-sensei sighs, a fond but tired thing.

Sakura forces herself to hold onto her resentment.

She isn’t being unreasonable.

She has a reason to be angry.

“Now, one last thing before I let you go,” Kakashi-sensei says.

Sakura tilts her head.

“I would like to offer you a position. If you’re back for good, that is.”

Sakura raises an eyebrow in question. “Position?”

“Mm, yes. On the Council.”

Sakura blinks.

“The Council.”

Kakashi-sensei nods.

“The Council of Elders?”

Her voice is bone-dry, desert-dry.

“Oh!” Kakashi-sensei says, all fake surprise. “Has the news not reached Suna yet?”

Sakura narrows her eyes at him. “What news?” she grits out. She doesn’t have the patience for his games.

“The Elders, in their wisdom, decided that they had served their village to the best of their skills and that it was now their duty to hand off village governance to the younger generation, who they have so carefully and faithfully nurtured.”

Sakura has to swallow her laughter at the sheer vicious glee hiding under Kakashi-sensei’s mien of staid deference.

“I see,” she says. “And the new Council?”

“Mah, mah, Sakura-chan,” Kakashi-sensei scolds, “it’s impolite to fish for compliments so. You know very well that you are not only a senior medical officer in the village, but also an important diplomatic figure well known and respected across the Elemental Nations for your skills and your exploits before and after the War. Not to mention your understanding of the Village’s civilian population’s needs or your connections to Sand and the Daimyo.”

Sakura adamantly does not blush. “I am honoured by your offer,” she says, bowing her head deeply.

“Then you accept?”

Sakura’s lips twitch. “Who am I to refuse my Hokage’s request?”

Kakashi-sensei smiles. “You’re Haruno Sakura. I think you can do anything you’d like.”

Sakura stares at him.

Familiar dark eyes stare back at her.

She doesn’t think he’s ever looked at her straight on like this before. She doesn’t think he’s ever looked at her like more than the girl she once was.

“I accept,” Sakura says, “with the utmost thanks.”

Kakashi-sensei nods, and Sakura stands to leave.

“What prompted the Elders to make their decision?” she asks as she pauses by the door.

“Certain clan heads might have suggested that they might wish to enjoy their last years in peace,” Kakashi-sensei drawls. “Yamanaka-sama was very kind in her worry for their health. In fact, she was quite adamant about the possible side effects of to much stress and very delicately addressed the issue of the prevalence of dementia and other cognitive disorders that come with age. Sometimes it can set in alarmingly fast, as I’m sure you know, with little prior warning. It would be a shame if any of the Elders had been forced to retire before their time due to illness.”

Sakura’s lips curl up into a smile.

“A real tragedy,” she agrees.

“Sakura-chan,” Kakashi-sensei says as she opens the door. “I’ve no right to it, but I’m proud of you.”

Sakura looks at him over her shoulder. “I know you fought for me, Kakashi-sensei. I forgive you for taking so long; I know how you’re always late to things.”

He’s laughing as she closes the door behind her.

It’s only a little sad.

 

 

 

“Ino,” Sakura says, helplessly. “How could you risk it?”

Ino sighs when she looks at her, and drops down on to the couch.

“I wasn’t risking anything.”

Sakura whirls. “Not risking anything?” she shouts. “Ino, you threatened the Elders.”

Ino smiles. “I did no such thing.”

“You told them to retire or you would scramble their brains!” Sakura’s hands tremble as they cut through the air.

“Dementia is a real problem in the elderly,” Ino shrugs, disinterestedly.

Sakura scrubs her hands though her hair. “Ino,” she says again, raw and scared and gods, but what Ino risked?

“Sakura,” Ino says, firm and steady. “I wasn’t going to let them force you into marrying Sasuke.”

“I’m one person, Ino. One! And you risked your entire clan—”

Ino stands, blazing. “You think I would risk my clan for you? I am Yamanaka Ino, daughter of Inoichi, and I know exactly what I owe my family. I owe them a Village that will protect them, not a Village that will sell them out for a false peace. I refused to let those old vultures ruin anymore of my people. I love you Sakura, but I wouldn’t have risked my clan if it meant saving just you.”

Ino is in Sakura’s face, rage dripping from her mouth like honey, blazing and brilliant and the most beautiful thing Sakura has ever seen.

“You love me?” Sakura asks, barely more than a breath.

Ino grabs Sakura’s face in her hands. “Of course I do, you fucking idiot. Of course I do.”

Ino shakes her slightly.

“How could you ever think differently?”

Sakura swallows.

“You never said.”

Ino’s mouth twists in a mockery of a smile.

“You didn’t want to hear it.”

“Ino,” Sakura gasps.

“I wrote you love letters.”

“You insulted me and called me names.”

Ino stares at her, blue eyes all Sakura can see.

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how to speak the language of flowers.”

Sakura touches a hand to Ino’s cheek.

“You should have said something.”

Ino closes her eyes.

“I didn’t want to make you feel guilty. I didn’t want to make you feel like you had to come back if you didn’t want to.”

“Ino,” Sakura says.

Ino shakes her head, a refusal.

So Sakura does the only thing she can think of to make this better, to soothe the furrow of pain in Ino’s brow, to calm the aching beat of her own heart.

So Sakura does the one thing she wanted since longer than she can remember, the one thing she didn’t know she wanted until Ino wrote her love letters and pretended that every pressed flower wasn’t a declaration.

So Sakura does the only thing she can in this moment with Ino the most precious thing she’s ever held.

Sakura pulls her forward, and kisses her.

 

 

 

Sandstorms are less consuming than the way Ino kisses Sakura like she’s something wonderful.

 

 

 

“Are you going to leave again?” Ino asks when they’re curled together in her bed.

The covers are hot and stifling, but Sakura doesn’t ever want to leave the small cocoon they’ve wrapped themselves up in.

“Why would I leave?” Sakura says. “I’m finally home.”

 

 

 

 

Sakura dreams of Ino spilled across the sand in the moonlight.

The stars dance up above them, but all Sakura has ever needed is under her fingertips.

“I love you,” Sakura says to the stars, to the moon, to the sand.

The desert swallows the sound up.

Sakura doesn’t mind. She will say it every day for the rest of her life, and it will never not be true.

The sands scoured her clean; Sakura loves, it’s what she carries in her bones, and there is no hiding in the desert.

“I love you,” Sakura whispers into Ino’s mouth.

Ino swallows the words down.

Flowers sprout around them.

“I love you.”

Sakura plants her feet, and stops running.

She’s home.


	6. sow/sew; reap/weep

Ino is six when she finds the stranger sleeping in the Nara Forest.

The stranger is bloodied and dirty and too thin. Her arm is pulled in carefully to her stomach and, to Ino’s untrained eyes, it looks like it’s at a wrong angle.

She’s curled in a tangle of roots at the base of a towering tree, almost invisible but for the scrap of unsullied white silk that is draped over one of the massive roots. It’s what caught Ino’s eye as she traipsed through the woods on her way to see if she can bug Shikamaru into playing tea party with her; when he deigns to, he does an excellent death scene as “unsuspecting Daimyo poisoned by beautiful undercover kunoichi”.

Ino hovers as she crouches and looks down at the sleeping woman.

Ino should leave, should go find her Shikaku-ojisan or her tōchan and tell them that there is a stranger in the Nara Forest.

Ino should leave, because she is the Clan Heir, and her kāchan will be very disappointed if Ino gets herself killed for her curiosity.

Ino should leave.

But if she leaves, then who knows if anyone will find the stranger again and if anyone will find out what she was doing in the Nara Forest, where no one who was not supposed has ever entered.

Ino drops a leaf on the stranger’s nose and springs back, kunai at the ready.

The stranger’s eyes blink open, a slow sweep of eyelashes, revealing irises so green that Ino’s hand wavers and she leans forward, trying to make out the shades of springtime as they swirl in eyes so deep Ino has to steady herself on the root she’s perched on, lest she fall right into them.

For a moment, the stranger tips her head back—baring her throat as she hums, waking up—but then those too green eyes catch on Ino and she startles, pulling her arm closer to her body and flinching away, turning her back to Ino and Ino’s kunai in an attempt to protect that broken arm.

“Who are you?” Ino demands, scowling at the way her voice is too high and too young, not enough force behind the command.

The stranger swallows and then her tongue darts out to wet her lower lip. “Are you going to kill me?” she rasps out.

“No!” Ino gasps. “Of course not!”

Well, tōchan might decide differently, but Ino isn’t just going to kill the stranger. Not without knowing why she’s here in the Nara Forest, purple bruises pressed under her eyes and her hair a colourless snarl.

“Well then,” the stranger says, and curls back up in her bed of roots.

Ino stares.

Should she… do something?

Ino really can’t just leave the stranger here.

She should… tie her up and come back with her tōchan?

“Do you need help?” Ino asks instead.

One green eye blinks back open in a catlike gesture of disdain.

“No,” the stranger says. “I’m fine. Leave me alone.”

“Because”—Ino wavers on her tree root—“I think your arm is broken. And I think you look like you need help.”

“Go away, little girl,” the stranger orders.

Ino narrows her eyes and purses her lips. “No.”

“I said,” says the stranger, “go away.”

Ino startles backwards, off her perch, because suddenly the stranger is not a curled up hurt thing; she towers high, green eyes crackling, her voice echoing through the ages.

Ino sprawls across the forest floor and looks up and up and up at something that is not human.

For a brief, blinding moment, Ino is six and she knows in her bones that she is going to be washed away under the power of this stranger.

But then that shrieking otherness dissipates and, once again, Ino can breathe.

The stranger wavers.

And then she collapses.

Ino waits.

When, after long minutes, nothing changes, she gets up and pokes the stranger.

The stranger doesn’t move.

Ino ties her up with the wire she keeps in the pouch at her waist, and runs to get her tōchan.

 

 

 

Kāchan inhales softly when their clansmen deposit the still unconscious stranger on a futon in a small room with no windows and only one door.

“Ino-chan,” kāchan says, “where did you find her?”

Ino blinks. “Under a tree.”

Slowly, so slowly, kāchan unfolds the stranger’s arm from her stomach.

Ino stands on her toes to get a good look over her cousin’s arm where he’s barring her from getting any further through the doorway.

A small, cloth wrapped bundle tumbles down, spilling dirt, and kāchan hisses out an impolite curse, fumbling to catch the bundle before it hits the ground. Her hands are careful as she unwinds the soiled cloth to reveal…

A sapling?

The room holds its breath.

“Kāchan?” Ino asks.

“Oh, Ino-chan,” kāchan sighs, something rapturous and filled with sunlight in her voice. “Oh, my love, do you understand what you have brought us?”

 

 

 

Ino swings her feet, humming as she stitches the tear in her practice clothes, tongue sticking out ever so slightly.

The sunlight streaming through the windows is thick and slow, painting the room in almost too bright colours.

Nothing, of course, is quite as bright as the washed and combed and completely foreign pink hair spread out on the pillow as the room’s other occupant sleeps.

She’s slept for days now.

Ino wants her to wake because she has so many questions, but she’s been warned that she must let their guest sleep and recover.

So, Ino is waiting.

Impatiently, but she’s waiting.

In the windowsill, a small sapling, barely more than a sprout, basks in the sunlight pouring in, content in its shallow dish and rich earth.

Ino sews, and waits.

 

 

 

“Your hospitality, Yamanaka-san—” their guest begins.

“A gift,” tōchan interrupts gently, something ever so watchful lurking in his eyes.

Ino sits very still in her place at her tōchan’s side; she doesn’t dare fidget with the slightly too long sleeves of her new kimono. In this moment, with almost the entire clan assembled, Ino is her father’s heir first, before anything else.

“Ah,” their guest counters, her face twisting up with something wry, something wild, something Ino does not yet have the words to describe, “but even gifts must be repaid.”

“We would never be so uncouth as to demand repayment for a gift,” tōchan demurs.

The wry grin shifts into something wider, with too many teeth. “No,” she agrees, “I am sure you would never. But shinobi are shinobi, and I am what I am. There are always rules in the end.”

Tōchan nods ever so slightly.

“My kind do not suffer debts lightly,” their guest continues. “I am tired of dancing around the subject, I have never had the patience for the wordplay so many of my kin enjoy; what will you ask of me, Yamanaka-san?”

Her hands rest gracefully in her lap, not a shred of tension visible in the tendons, and her green gaze is placid, but Ino shivers with a chill, with the unspoken threat in the air.

Her tōchan does not blink.

“Stay,” he asks. “We Yamanaka do so love our flowers, Kodama-sama. Stay, and I swear my clan will see to it that your saplings flourish along every path a Yamanaka walks.”

 

 

 

Their guest stays.

Ino breathes out a sigh of relief and doesn’t quite know why.

 

 

 

“Can I ask you a question?” Ino asks, her hair a tumble around her face as she dangles at her knees from a branch.

“You just did,” the Kodama informs her smartly.

Ino makes a face.

The Kodama laughs. It sounds like wind rustling through leaves. “Yes, child, you can ask me a question. I won’t promise to answer though.”

Ino weighs that response for a moment before shrugging to herself and deciding to continue.

“You’re a tree?”

The Kodama laughs again. “Yes,” she agrees, “and no.”

“Huh.” Ino pushes her hair out of her eyes so that she can smile at the Kodama. “Neat.”

The Kodama looks up from where she’s been tending her small sapling. Her mouth curls into something amused. She shrugs. “I am what I have always been, no more.”

Ino stares at her skeptically. She’s not sure how effective the expression is upside-down. “But you’re a  _spirit_.”

The Kodama shrugs again. “And you’re a girl. Is that really any more strange?”

 

 

 

“What can I call you?” Ino asks.

The Kodama watches her carefully from the corner of her eye. “Names have power, little one. You shouldn’t go sharing them carelessly.”

 

 

 

Ino is eight when the raiding party attacks.

Tōchan and most of their fighting force are currently days away, bolstering an Akimichi defence against the ever encroaching Uchiha.

“Ino,” her kāchan barks, her face streaked with gore and a bloody katana in hand, “to the grove. Our guest must be warned.”

Ino wants to protest that she can fight. She isn’t a baby anymore. But their guest is important too, and Ino is her mother’s daughter: she does what she’s told.

She runs for the grove, dodging around skirmishes as her aunts and cousins fight and kill and die. If she can do so without drawing too much attention to herself, Ino throws the odd kunai or applies her small feet to the back of knees and necks, but their guest is in the grove and Ino cannot,  _cannot_  let the accord they have their guest be desecrated by these would-be invaders.

Not only does the Yamanaka’s honour rest on maintaining their hospitium, but given that their guest is Kodama…

One does not break a promise to a spirit. Not if they want their family to live on uncursed.

Ino runs, brushing off the sticking tendrils of fear as they try to cling. She is Yamanaka, she will not falter.

“Friend!” she pants as she skids into the grove. “We’re under attack!”

At first, Ino cannot see her, but then, like breathing, a tall willowy figure steps forward, dark arms folding down into something that cannot touch the sky, the rough ridges of bark smoothing into something less harsh.

Green eyes blink open, and a hand brushes Ino’s cheek.

“Ino-chan, are you alright?”

“The compound is under attack. Kāchan sent me to warn you.”

Just as suddenly as before, the Kodama’s soft face sharpens into something rougher than skin, her eyes narrowing to violent green slits.

Distantly, above the noise of clashing steel and cries of pain, Ino could swear she can hear the groaning of roots far beneath her.

“Let them come,” the Kodama snarls, “and I will water my grove with their blood.”

Ino stares, wide-eyed, and does her best to not cower before the not-woman towering above her.

Then, like sunlight filtering through leaves, that dark hand brushes Ino’s cheek once again.

Ino looks the Kodama in the eye.

“Don’t worry, Ino-chan,” she says, “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

When the invaders come, the ground yawns beneath them, and swallows them up.

 

 

 

“Ino-chan,” tōchan croons.

Ino struggles to open her eyes, weighed down by healing teas and the pain still echoing in her forearms.

“You did so well, my love,” her tōchan whispers, brushing the hair from her forehead. “I am so very proud.”

 

 

 

When Ino wakes, familiar dark hands are smearing poultice on the burns covering her arms.

“My grove would have burned,” the Kodama says, “if you had not stopped that man with the torch.  _I_ would have burned.”

Ino tries to shrug, but she’s still so tired, and every inch of her is still too heavy. “Promise,” she rasps.

“You are a child,” the Kodama says, “that is not your promise to keep.”

Ino shakes her head. “Heir.”

The Kodama frowns as she rewraps Ino’s arms, then stands, and brings back a glass of water.

Her hands are steady as she holds Ino up to drink.

The water soothes the screaming in Ino’s throat and clears some of the blurriness from her mind.

“Sakura,” says the Kodama.

Ino blinks and cocks her head in confusion.

“My name.”

 

 

 

“I broke Kazumi-obasan’s favourite tea cup.”

“If Shika beats me at shōji in less than fifteen minutes one more time, I’m going to just jump across the table and fight him instead.”

“Purple or green for my new kimono?”

“…and he has such pretty brown eyes…”

“Tōchan is trying to teach me this new form and I just— ha— can’t— ha— get it right! Ow! Damnit!”

“Hold this down while I stitch this?”

“I’m leading my first protection mission next week. (I think I’m scared.)”

As Ino grows, she comes and lays her secrets and worries at the base of the cherry tree growing ever larger in the grove.

None of them ever seem to fill up quite the same space as the three syllables that make up  _Sakura_.

 

 

 

“Ino,” Sakura smiles, melting out of her tree.

“Sakura,” Ino breathes, and has to hold herself back from sweeping her friend into her arms and laying her head against the strong breadth of her shoulders.

Instead, Ino stops two feet away (too close and still too far), and tilts her head back to smile tiredly up at her friend.

“You’re back,” Sakura says, unnecessarily. “Are you hurt?”

Ino does not reach for the lashes peppering her back. “No, I’m not hurt. Just tired.”

Sakura opens her mouth as if to argue, but then sighs and lets it go.

Ino tries to convince herself that she’s relieved.

It’s fine. She’ll head to the healers after this.

She just needed to see Sakura first.

“I think the cutting you gave me before I left took,” Ino says, rushing to find something to say, anything to say.

Anything that is not a torrent of how she missed Sakura when she was gone.

“Did it?” Sakura asks, green eyes sparkling with delight. “Where was it this time?”

“Ame,” Ino says, “the not-so-rainy part.”

“Thank you, Ino,” Sakura says, so heartfelt that Ino wants to cry for the warm caress of it.

“You’re welcome,” she says instead.

“Now, let’s get you to the healers,” Sakura insists, ushering Ino out of the grove with a hand fitted to the curve of her spine.

Ino laughs, and does not melt into the weight it there, anchoring her down—steadying her, pulling her down beneath the waves.

 

 

 

“Tōchan is looking at suitors,” Ino whispers, quieter than the rustling grass.

Sakura freezes for a moment, her stillness unnatural in a creature so constantly in subtle motion, before she forces herself to relax.

The sunshine drifts lazily through the pink flowers blossoming above them.

“Do you want to get married?” Sakura asks her.

Ino shrugs and doesn’t let her face twist up into the ugly snarl that simmers in her veins. “I am the Heir. I owe it to my clan to marry and have children of my own.”

Sakura frowns. “I don’t understand, why do you have to marry? Choose a healthy mate, let him pollinate you, and then have a child. Why should you marry unless you do so for love?”

Ino closes her eyes against the tears.

“It doesn’t work that way for girls,” she says.

Sakura’s frown darkens.

“It should.”

Ino swallows and cannot find it in her to disagree (to lie).

 

 

 

Ino is wearing white when she appears in the grove.

“Ino!” Sakura exclaims in surprise. Her hands twitch once at her sides. “What are you doing here?”

“I just—” Ino hovers at the edge of the clearing.

“You’re supposed to be getting married,” Sakura says, confusion lacing every edge of her words.

“I know,” Ino says.

She paces, sharp jerking movements that halt only when a familiar hand stills her with a touch to her forearm.

Sakura’s hands look even darker against the white silk. Her fingers trace the burn scars they both know lay there through the layers of fabric.

Ino shivers.

“Why are you here, Ino?” Sakura asks.

“Will you answer a question for me?” Ino asks in return.

Green, green eyes, much too old and fae shine down at her, and Ino is helpless to do anything but lean forward into them.

“Perhaps,” Sakura says. “It will depend, as always, on the question.”

Ino flexes her hands once, twice, before reaching up and pulling Sakura down to meet her.

Sakura tastes like soil and growing things and the first blush of spring.

Sakura tastes like honeyed sunlight and dancing under starlight and everything Ino will never get to keep.

Ino kisses her for an impossible age, for the briefest moment.

When she pulls away, green eyes blink open with a slow sweep of pink lashes against a dark cheek.

“Was that the question?” Sakura asks.

Ino shivers at the rushing of deep waters and the grinding of rocks in her voice.

“Yes,” she rasps.

“Did you get the answer you were looking for?”

Ino closes her eyes and tries to smile. “It’s true, what they say about spirits, isn’t it? Even when you’re telling the truth, it’s a lie.”

“Ino—” Sakura starts, reaching out a hand to touch her.

But Ino is already at the edge of the grove, and farther still.

 

 

 

“Is there a universe where we’re together and happy and life is simple?” Ino asks.

Sakura cradles a dark haired, blue eyed child in the bower of her arms.

“Are we not here together, happy?” Sakura asks in return.

Ino looks at her son cradled in those arms that will weather storms years and years hence.

Ino looks at the sunlight kissing her babe’s cheeks as it filters through the leaves and the way Sakura’s tangled snarl of pink hair blazes in that same light.

“I suppose we are,” she answers.

She wonders if Sakura can see the sadness in her smile.

She wonders how many more summer days like this she will get to keep.

 

 

 

“I’m tired,” Ino sighs.

Sakura pulls her closer, tucking Ino’s head under her chin.

“I don’t think I’m going to get the chance to plant that cutting you gave me in Iwa, on that cliff top I told you about,” Ino says. “Forgive me?”

Sakura presses a kiss to the top of Ino’s grey head. “Always.”

 

 

 

It’s decades of honey drenched summer afternoons spent under cool green leaves.

It’s not nearly enough time.

 

 

 

A woman curls up in a tangle of roots.

She does not wake.

 

 

 

“Ojiisan?” the little girl asks. “Why is the cherry tree dying? Is it sick?”

The old man stares down at his granddaughter.

“Maybe it’s heartsick!” he teases her.

Her nose scrunches. “Don’t be silly, ojiisan! Trees don’t have hearts!”

Half a continent away, a not-woman drops a leaf, but no blue eyes blink open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** Naruto Femslash Week 2017, Day 1: Mythology/Family


	7. leave/believe; beholden/golden

**i.**

“Really?” Ino demands, her hair falling in her face as she sits up abruptly. She sweeps it gracefully behind her ear, scowling when her fingers tangle at the last moment. “You seriously have never kissed anyone?”

“What?” Sakura asks, crossing her arms in front of her. “It's not a big deal. I just… haven't found the right person is all.”

Ino gets her hair sorted and fully rights herself, shifting to face Sakura directly.

“Sakura,” she sighs something worn and exasperated and sad in her voice, “how long are you going to wait for Sasuke?”

Sakura tightens her arms further, pulling her knees up to her chest. She looks away from Ino's steady gaze, letting her bangs slip to shield her eyes.

“I’m not—”

“Yes,” Ino cuts her off, cutting her, “don't even try to lie to me, Haruno Sakura. I'll believe you when you can look me in the eye and say that without flinching.”

Sakura scowls and pushes her hair roughly out of her face again, turning back to glare at Ino.

“I’m not waiting for Sasuke-kun,” she declares.

The claim is cracked right down the middle, Sakura's voice shattering along the fault lines.

The lie falls heavy between them, a vicious thing dripping viscera.

“Right,” Ino drawls back. “You sounded really firm about that.”

Sakura sniffles and rubs her hand roughly across her mouth, scrubbing at the sob trapped between her teeth.

“Ah, fuck,” Ino sighs, and crawls across the bed to press her thigh against Sakura's and wrap an arm around Sakura's shoulders to pull her into the curve of Ino's body. “Don't cry.”

“I’m not crying,” Sakura spits through the tears welling at the back of her throat.

Ino sighs again, and rests her cheek against Sakura's hair.

They sit quietly for a long moment as Sakura struggles with the heavy grief aching in her breastbone.

“I know they’re your team, Sakura, but you need to stop waiting on those boys. They might never come home.”

“Naruto promised,” Sakura manages passed the blades in her lungs.

The words are worn through, shot with holes, but still Sakura wraps herself in their comfortable embrace: a worry stone she comes back to always.

(One day, she fears the words will fall to pieces between her fingers and she will have nothing left to buffer her from the long cold nights when the wolves howl and she is all alone.)

“I know he did,” Ino says.

It doesn't sound like an agreement.

The quiet settles around them again.

Sakura leans further into the firmament of Ino's embrace.

“I know—“ Sakura starts, “I know it wouldn't be—I know it isn't fair—but it feels like it'd be a betrayal, to kiss someone else when they're both still so far away.”

(It feels like betrayal to grow up without them; Naruto and Sasuke-kun eternally babyfaced boys with too much weighing heavy on their slim shoulders in her memories.)

(She doesn't dare let herself consider that maybe there is nothing left for her to betray.)

“You deserve to be happy,” Ino says. “They'd want you to be happy. And if they didn't, they wouldn't deserve you.”

Sakura doesn't argue, too raw for words.

“Here,” Ino says, taking Sakura's chin in her hand.

Sakura doesn't resist as Ino tilts her head back, letting the weight of it fall into the waiting palm of Ino's other hand.

“Ino?” Sakura asks, her eyes settling on Ino's lips.

A pink tongue darts out.

“Let me?” It's barely louder than the rasp of silk against silk in the silent room.

Sakura nods, letting her lashes flutter shut.

It's startling, the first dry brush of warmth, then the second, then that pink tongue sweeping across Sakura's lower lip.

Sakura opens, blossoming—as she always does—at Ino's touch.

It's soft and slow and Ino licks the taste of grief from Sakura's mouth.

Finally, after an age, Ino pulls away, dropping quick kisses to the corner of Sakura's lips, her chin, her cheekbone.

“There,” Ino says, her voice honeyed sunlight.

Sakura's hands are twisted viciously in Ino's hair.

“They can't complain. You were mine first.”

The way Ino says it, possession curled around her tongue, makes Sakura shiver.

Sakura swallows and—

They don't talk about it.

 

 

 

**ii.**

Naruto comes home.

Then, even if they wanted to talk about it, Sakura can barely hear for the war drums echoing in her bones and all she can do is catch blue eyes in a crowd before she is rushing, rushing, the future rushing forward, sweeping them away.

 

 

 

**iii.**

“I’m beat,” Sakura declares as she collapses down next to Ino on the grass.

Further into the clearing, away from the tree line where Ino and Sakura are sprawled in the shade, Hinata and Tenten are squaring up while Lee and Naruto cheer from the sidelines. Behind the boys, Shikamaru chats with Chōji and Sai while Shino mocks a sulking Kiba.

“Are you going to fix Kiba's nose?” Ino asks.

Sakura sniffs. "It's only a little broken. He should have shifted left, not right; I could have shattered his whole face if I was a little less careful. Anyways, he's been dodging his physical, and this way he has to go to the hospital.”

Ino stares at Sakura's smile, filled with too many teeth, as she stares Kiba down across the clearing.

Ino laughs when Kiba looks away first, his head tilting back to bare his throat ever so slightly as he turns away.

Sakura's grin widens and then she throws herself backwards to drop her head against Ino's thigh.

Ino cards her fingers through Sakura’s hair and Sakura hums, letting the rhythmic stroking and the warmth of the afternoon lull her to sleep.

“Sakura,” Ino croons.

A long finger trails down the bridge of her nose. Sakura swats at it.

“Time to wake up, sleepy head.”

Sakura comes to slowly.

She’s swathed in a curtain of gold, Ino’s face hanging over her.

Still half-asleep, Sakura reaches up a hand, thumb sliding along Ino’s jaw bone, her palm cupping her cheek.

“Hey,” Sakura smiles, thumb rubbing gently at the soft patch of skin at the hinge of Ino’s jaw.

“Hey,” Ino smiles back, and turns to press a kiss to Sakura’s palm. “It’s starting to get dark, we should go.”

Ino’s pulse is steady under Sakura’s touch, but the brush of Ino’s lips against the callouses along the heel of her hand has the breath catching in Sakura’s lungs.

Behind Ino’s head and beyond the curtain of her hair shielding them from the world, the sky is bleeding to pinks and purples.

“Ino,” Sakura sighs.

“Sakura,” Ino says back, only mildly mocking.

Sakura licks her lips.

She almost swears Ino’s gaze follows the path of her tongue.

“You’re beautiful,” Sakura tells Ino, the words punched out of her by the way Ino is lit up with light, the words spilling out of her after being dammed behind her teeth for so long.

Ino smiles wider, smiles softer.

“Let me?” Ino asks, an echo of another time, another life.

Sakura nods, and leans up to meet her.

Dusk blooms around them.

Ino presses honeyed kisses to Sakura’s lips, and all is golden light and happiness steeped into her bones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** Naruto Femslash Week 2017: First Kiss/Training Sessions


	8. give/greed; live/concede

“Shinobi don’t have soulmates,” kāchan chides her, stroking Ino’s hair out of her face.

Her hands are calloused sturdy things with dirt under the nail beds, but they’re gentle when they touch Ino.

“Why not?” Ino asks, looking up at her mother from where she’s curled up in bed. “Aren’t you and tōchan soulmates?”

Kāchan smiles sadly.

Her hands don’t reach for the place where her colourful mark is tattooed on her wrist, just high enough to kiss the heel of her palm.

“No.”

Ino frowns, brows drawing in. “But then who is your soulmate? And why did you marry tōchan?”

Kāchan’s soul knot is a rippling ocean of blue, not the stark black outline of a ‘mate never met.

Kāchan’s smile gets wider and sadder.

Ino wants to cry for it.

“Shinobi don’t have soulmates, Ino-chan,” she says. “They’re a vulnerability we cannot afford.”

“Oh,” Ino says.

Her mother presses a kiss to her forehead and wishes her sweet dreams, not quite shutting the door to Ino’s room as she leaves her daughter to her sleep.

(What Kāchan doesn’t tell five year old Ino—what Ino won’t know until she is nineteen and her tōchan has been dead for two years and her mother has never looked so old and grief-stained—is that Kāchan’s mark bloomed colour as she snapped a man’s neck, his eyes glancing down to the oceans raging at her wrist in the moment before the life was snuffed out of them.)

 

 

 

Ino is Yamanaka.

This she knows in her bones.

She belongs to her family and to her Village.

She doesn’t have the luxury of belonging to a single person first.

 

 

 

But then.

 

 

 

Sakura.

 

 

 

In the end, when Ino is old and grey and carries crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and her life has been innumerable tragedies and infinite joy, when Ino is old and looks back at the long winding road of her life, it all—every breath of it, all the tears and rage and laughter—comes back to Sakura.

 

 

 

Ino is Yamanaka.

This she knows in her bones.

She will be a shinobi and one day she will be Clan Head and her duty is to her family and her Village.

It could be easy to turn away and leave the civilians to their power-plays.

It isn’t her problem. Civilians are strange and unfamiliar and she does not understand the way they jockey for position.

Ino is Yamanaka. She knows exactly where she stands and so do the rest of her classmates (Shikamaru and Chōji at her shoulders, her hands curving into familiar seals).

It isn’t her problem. It is not the place for the Clans to interfere with civilian business.

But.

Ino’s duty is to her family and her Village.

 

 

 

It’s too easy to stare Ami and her bullies down.

The words of their exchange don’t matter.

The only thing that matters in this exchange is the shade of Ino’s eyes.

 

 

 

She’s cute, Sakura that is; a small wounded thing, like the baby bird Ino found in the Nara Forest and brought to Yoshino-obasan to nurse back to health. She hides behind her fringe and speaks softly.

Except.

Ino is not a Nara, to analyze a situation and break it down into pieces to be moved across the game-board. But Ino is Yamanaka: her blue eyes watch people and find the fault lines upon which to shatter them or the wounds that needs stitching back up.

Sakura is a small hurt thing, but when she forgets, she turns on Ami and the rest with an upturned lip and cat green eyes.

Ino wants to carve the meekness from her to reveal that ferocity that makes up her foundation.

 

 

 

Ino pokes Sakura in the forehead, startling the smaller girl who cowers further.

“You shouldn’t hide, you know. If you stopped hiding, they wouldn’t know you were scared and they would stop trying to take advantage,” Ino tells her, only a little bit exasperated.

Then, Ino pushes Sakura’s hair out of her face, the way kāchan does to soothe her when she’s sad. She wants to see what Sakura’s smile looks like when she’s not hiding.

 

 

 

Ino’s fingers brush across Sakura’s forehead in benediction.

 

 

 

There is a black circle inked at the base of Ino’s sternum that unfolds like a flower but is colourless and bleak.

 

 

 

Ino’s fingers brush across Sakura’s forehead in benediction.

 

 

 

Warmth blooms in Ino’s chest.

Ino doesn’t know it yet—except for how as the warmth blooms in her, the universe shifting to centre around this scared girl with rounded shoulders whose eyes, Ino just knows, speak of buried greatness—but the flower inked onto her breastbone is blushing with pinks and oranges and lilacs too.

 

 

 

Warmth blooms in Ino’s chest.

Sakura’s green eyes go wide wide wide, her hand clamping down reflexively on her thigh, her thumb rubbing over the cloth there like it’s a talisman.

 

 

 

Warmth blooms in Ino’s chest.

 

 

 

Ino is Yamanaka.

This she knows in her bones.

She will be a shinobi and one day she will be Clan Head and her duty is to her family and her Village.

 

 

 

“Shinobi don’t have soulmates,” kāchan told her.

 

 

 

Ino carves the warmth from her chest and the light from Sakura’s eyes.

She carves the memory of that blooming warmth from Sakura’s mind, too.

 

 

 

Ino is Yamanaka, and one day she will be Clan Head, but today she is only eight years old.

Her fingers are clumsy as she flickers through familiar seals.

It’s an ugly brutal job as she carves the memory from Sakura’s mind, the knowledge of what they are to one another.

(It’s many years too late that Ino understands the scars she left behind, and worse, the gaping wounds she clawed into Sakura’s head that will never quite heal.)

 

 

 

“Shinobi don’t have soulmates,” kāchan told her.

But, well, Ino is selfish, and shinobi are liars and thieves.

 

 

 

Ino steals Sakura and keeps her best she can.

 

 

 

When Sakura unravels the ribbons Ino has tied them together with (ephemeral useless things that are not enough, will never be enough, not in the face of what Ino sacrificed) for a boy Sakura declares she’s in love with, Ino does not weep.

It’s no less than she deserves.

 

 

 

She breaks Sakura’s arm in their next sparring match and stares her down when Sakura dares cry for the pain of it.

 

 

 

When Ino is thirteen she fights Sakura again.

It’s familiar and easy to slip into Sakura’s mind, the natural walls that should fight to keep intruders out falling away under the slightest brush of Ino’s fingers, like Ino is welcome in the darkest and most secret corners of Sakura’s soul.

It’s familiar and easy.

And then a ghost of a girl, black and white and no colour to be seen, a bleak thing, is towering over Ino.

“How dare you?” the ghost screeches. “How dare you come here? After what you did? Get out. Get out! GET OUT!”

The ghost punches her, a fist right to her breastbone, and Ino’s soul plummets right back into her body.

 

 

 

Her chest aches and every breath she takes freezes.

 

 

 

Sakura turns up one day at the flower shop, two cups of tea in hand and a container of dango tucked under her arm.

Ino takes the tea and doesn’t let their fingers brush.

 

 

 

Shinobi are liars and thieves.

Ino is selfish. She takes what she can and then takes a little more.

 

 

 

Ino is not a creature made for forgiveness.

Hatake Kakashi can rot for the way he would have left Sakura defenceless even while he let her team lead her to her death.

Somedays she wants to hiss and claw because Ino has no place to condemn another’s selfishness, but Uzumaki Naruto is so blinded that he calls his own righteousness and pushes on without thought. He thinks he loves Sakura, but he doesn’t even understand how Sakura was never built to be left alone. (Sakura is a hothouse flower; she requires warmth and watering and tender care.)

If Shikamaru were not there to clamp a hand to the back of her neck, Ino would have ripped Uchiha Sasuke’s mind to shreds and damn the consequences.

Once, she would have given him Sakura, if it would have made Sakura happy.

Then he tried to put his hand through Sakura’s heart.

Then he looked at her Village and would have seen it burn.

 

 

 

“Ino,” Sakura starts, reaching out to touch her.

Ino stares blank-faced at the horizon. Her blue Yamanaka eyes aren’t enough to see the smoking ruins where her tōchan and ojisan's ashes are scattering.

“Don’t,” Ino rasps out, shifting so that Sakura’s hand falls to the side, missing her. “Not now. Not yet. I can’t—”

Sakura nods, her eyes red-rimmed and damp.

Sakura’s always been such a crybaby, Ino muses.

Ino is Yamanaka.

This she knows in her bones.

She is a shinobi and now, today, she is Clan Head.

 

 

 

Ino doesn’t see the punch coming.

When it hits her, it’s like the earth shattering, it’s like being unmade.

It hurts.

“How could you?” Sakura demands.

She’s incandescent in her fury.

She’s the most painful thing Ino has ever seen.

Ino snaps her nose back into place and spits out the blood from the cut along the inside of her cheek.

Ino doesn’t have to ask what Sakura means.

She can tell from the way Sakura’s hand is clenching on her thigh and by the cracks shining through green eyes.

“How  _could_  you?”

Sakura’s voice breaks clean through.

Ino swallows.

There are no excuses she can make.

There are no apologies that will ever be enough.

“Because I was scared,” she says, because she owes Sakura at least something, even if it will never be enough.

Sakura’s eyes burn.

“I hate you,” Sakura says.

It’s the bleakest, most terrible three words Ino has ever heard.

They split the air and land heavy on Ino’s ribcage.

“I  _hate_  you,” Sakura repeats.

Then she turns and walks away.

Ino falls to her knees under the pain of it, but she does not weep.

It’s no less than she deserves.

 

 

 

Ino doesn’t see the kiss coming.

“You bitch,” Sakura mutters as she bites Ino’s lower lip, teeth and claws, shoving Ino out of her doorway and against the wall in the entrance hallway of her apartment.

“You asshole,” Sakura continues, her hands pressing into Ino’s hips, pressing bruises.

Ino can’t breathe, the air stolen from her lungs as Sakura kisses her and kisses her and kisses her.

“I hate you,” Sakura says. “You stole so much from me. From us. I hate you. How could you? You selfish bitch.”

Ino doesn’t realize she’s lost her shirt and bra until Sakura stills, her hands framing Ino’s ribcage, thumbs not quite brushing Ino’s breastbone.

“Oh,” Sakura says, more a gasp than a word.

There’s an almost flower bushing pink and orange and lilac between Ino’s breasts.

“Oh.”

Sakura’s eyes are too green, full over with wanting and fury and need.

Slowly, so slowly, as if worried the even the slightest of movements will shatter the moment, will cause Ino to disappear under her hands, Sakura shifts her thumbs up.

Ino is shaking, her own palms pressed against the wall to keep herself steady.

“Oh.”

When Sakura finally, finally—after an age, after eleven years, after Ino’s lungs are aching for her inability to breathe because if she breathes then maybe this house of cards she has built will come crashing down around her and once again Sakura will be walking away—brushes it, thumbs tracing the delicate curves of the flower unfolding on Ino’s skin—

 

 

 

So this is death, Ino thinks.

 

 

 

Ino burns.

 

 

 

“I hate you,” Sakura mumbles later, much later, the two of them curled under Ino’s covers in a twisted mirror of the way they once curled together as girls.

Ino digs her nails into the soft inner skin of Sakura’s thigh where a sharp jagged star glitters in the colours of the night.

“I hate you too,” Ino says.

Shinobi are liars and thieves.

Ino will not apologize for taking what is hers.

 

 

 

“Shinobi don’t have soulmates,” kāchan told her.

Shinobi are liars and thieves.

 

 

 

Ino carries dirt and blood under her fingernails.

Sakura kisses with teeth.

 

 

 

They are fierce creatures.

 

 

 

Ino will not apologize for this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** Naruto Femslash Week 2017, Day 4: Soulmate AU/ ~~Fake Relationship~~


	9. drink/wink; mistake/unmake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _one night only/just the rest of our lives/i’d burn the world wholly/just to keep you alive_

“Well,” starts a familiar voice  _much_  too loudly for the way Sakura’s head is pounding and her mouth tastes like death and sunlight is streaming violently through the suddenly open curtains, “this isn’t quite what I was expecting to find when I came looking for my wayward student.”

The brilliant flash of the camera is blinding and Sakura groans as her stomach rebels for the pain.

“What the fuck, shishō?” Sakura mutters, her voice scraped thin.

Tsunade-shishō cackles. “Watch your fucking mouth, kiddo. I’m not the one currently getting caught after a wild night spent drinking.”

Sakura attempts to squint at her teacher and Hokage, but her eyes slam right back shut at the still too bright light now filling her bedroom. Or, well, like, the corner of her crappy shoebox apartment that doubles for a bedroom/office/floor closet.

“Aaaargmpphssspshhhuuugh?” a  _different_  familiar voice slurs out.

Sakura frowns, her eyes still closed, and pats around on her bed.

“Fuck off,” Ino snarls when Sakura’s hand smacks her on the face.

Or, at least, that’s what Sakura assumes she meant to snarl given the pure venom shot through the smashed up jumble of sounds, like the rumble of the earth in the moment after Sakura forces her chakra through her hand and down, hairline splinters racing outward before everything shatters.

“What the fuck?” Sakura demands again, her voice louder now, enough to make her wince at her own volume.

“Put some clothes on, you two,” Tsunade-shishō orders. “I’m going to go get myself a drink.”

Sakura blanches.

A  _drink_.

Oh  _no._

“Ino,” she hisses, “did we seriously  _steal sake from the Hokage last night and get drunk_?”

The previous evening is starting to come back to her now.

Ino pinches Sakura’s hip, making her squirm. Then Ino buries her face deeper into Sakura’s hip.

“No, idiot, we got drunk and  _then_  we stole the sake.”

Sakura says a few prayers.

At least—and this is by no means going to save them, but Sakura is at peace knowing her life could be ending more painfully than it surely will once she and Ino drag themselves out of bed and into her crappy kitchen to face off with the Godaime Hokage—they aren’t the ones who managed to  _miss_  the drunk chūnin who broke into the Hokage’s residence and made off with a crate full of high-end sake from a thankful merchant client for a job well done.

“We’re dead,” Sakura manages feebly.

Ino grunts. “I think I’m already dead.”

They lie together in mutual suffering for a moment.

“I’m waiting,” Tsunade-shishō’s voice singsongs.

Sakura is sitting up and throwing herself out of bed on reflex at that too pleased sound, adrenaline screaming through her veins because they are so dead,  _so dead_ , Ino making a distressed sound and reaching for her, before she can think.

And then she clutches her head and doubles over, trying not to heave.

It’s understandable then, really, that it takes Sakura so long to realize that she’s completely naked.

And that she’s got hickeys peppering her breasts, her stomach, and the inside of her thighs.

Sakura’s head whips around and stares at the equally nude Ino scowling on her war zone of a  bed, sheets pushed down around her knees from Sakura’s mad scramble to standing.

The last few memories from the previous night’s multiple adventures come crashing through Sakura’s mind.

Oh.

So that’s what Ino tastes like with sake on her lips, starlight in her hair as she sprawls across Sakura’s sheets with Sakura’s fingers pressed into her and curses on her tongue.

Sakura looks to her crappy kitchen—little more than a hotplate and a mini fridge and a scrounged up kitchen table she bribed Chōji and Kiba to help her move with food—where Tsunade-shishō is drinking  _tea_  of all things and watching them with a sly smile that has too many teeth to be comforting and then back to the  _other_  surprise blonde in her apartment who is now curiously examining the bloodied crescent moons pressed into her shoulder blades.

Sakura looks to the window and seriously considers bolting.

“If you jump out that window, Haruno Sakura, I will sic my ANBU on you to drag you back through the streets,” Tsunade-shishō warns.

Sakura pushes her chakra out, scanning for any familiar signatures at the edge of her limited range. She matches the signatures to her knowledge of the ANBU duty roster and considers it; she could probably outrun Bear, but Crane is a tricky motherfucker.

Sakura’s about to try her luck when—

“If you leave me alone to deal with this, Forehead, I will tell Lee your favourite flower and promise to give him discounts for the rest of his life,” Ino hisses at her.

Sakura takes a breath, ready to—

“And I will tell your mother that you could have married the Daimyo’s nephew but you refused.”

Sakura stops.

“You wouldn’t dare,” she says.

Ino raises an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t I, though?”

Sakura could always go missing nin. Tsunade-shishō probably wouldn’t let anyone kill her for it.

Probably.

Maybe.

“If you book it out of the Village,” Ino says, “then I won’t go on a second date with you.”

Sakura’s mind skips a beat and falls on its face.

She blinks.

She opens her mouth.

She closes her mouth.

She blinks again.

“Was last night a date?” Sakura asks.

Ino rolls her eyes aggressively.

“If you two don’t put some clothes on and get over here,” Tsunade-shishō warns, “I’m taking another picture for more blackmail.”

Sakura picks up a shirt and pulls it over her head.

It’s purple and doesn’t quite cover the line of hickeys down her abdomen and is obviously Ino’s. Sakura pulls on a pair of underwear too, and decides that that’s good enough.

Ino just wraps herself in a sheet and glides to Sakura’s ramshackle kitchen table like a queen.

“I like your spunk, Yamanaka,” Tsunade-shishō compliments.

Ino smiles.

Sakura slumps into the seat next to her, not an inch of grace in her.

“Now then,” Tsunade-shishō continues, “I think a late morning spar should make for a nice start to your morning. Meet me at our usual training field in fifteen minutes. Don’t bother changing into anything fancy; it’s just going to get ruined.”

Tsunade-shishō smiles broadly at them and saunters out of Sakura’s front door.

Sakura sets her head down on the table.

“My ANBU will make sure you get there safely,” Tsunade-shishō trills as she shuts the door behind her.

“Well,” Ino says, “that wasn’t so bad.”

Sakura lifts her head up to stare blankly at Ino.

“If we run now, we might make it to the Village limits before they notice we’re fleeing.”

“Sakura—”

“Ino, I want to actually  _live_  to get to our second date.”

Ino pauses. “I mean, she isn’t going to hurt us that badly? It’s just a sparring match?”

Sakura stares at her some more. “Yup, that’s it, we’re going. Quick! How many kunai do you have on you?”

 

 

 

 

Ino kisses her bruises better much, much,  _much_  later when they’re bundled up into hospital beds.

“I tried to warn you,” Sakura mutters.

“Shut up,” Ino commands as she presses another soft kiss to Sakura’s knuckles, “you have broken ribs, you shouldn’t be talking.”

“Should have ran when we had the chance,” Sakura continues on, undeterred. “Would have been romantic. Lovers on the run.”

“We would have been dead,” Ino reminds her.

“Well, yeah, eventually. But, I mean, we’d maybe get, like, a movie about our lives out of it,” Sakura muses.

Ino’s head whips up, blue eyes flashing, and she grabs Sakura by the jaw, pulling her in close.

“When I’m done with you,” Ino tells her, promise and honey dripping from every syllable, “the world will never be the same.”

Sakura blinks and then, slowly, nods.

Ino’s fingers make the her bruises cheek ache but she doesn’t pull away.

Sakura believes her.

She’d follow Ino as she burned the world down.

(Sakura has hands for healing and hands for breaking. Ino touches her, and she is unmade.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** Naruto Femslash Week 2017, Day 5: Partners in Crime/ ~~Betrayal~~


	10. 20. things you said that i wasn’t meant to hear

**** Ino’s never been afraid to speak her mind.

Six years old and wielding words like weapons: the shining knight to Sakura’s damsel.

Ino’s never been afraid to speak plain, to speak truth, to take Sakura by the back of the neck and make her look in the mirror, make her stop hiding from herself.

Sakura’s never known Ino to hide words under her tongue that weren’t expertly calibrated to be released at a later date in a perfect cascade of destruction, plans falling perfectly into motion.

Of the two of them, Sakura’s ever been the liar, too scared to see the world (and herself) in all its glory and ruin.

Sakura was happy with her cardboard dollhouses and gilded dreams.

Ino would rather peel herself out of her skin than live a lie.

And yet.

 

 

 

**i.**

 

“Hey, Sakura,” Ino drawls, holding each vowel in her mouth so long that it loses meaning.

“Hey, Ino.” Sakura smoothes the hair out of Ino’s face to better see her, but it’s mostly a lost cause for the glazed eyes and the way Ino’s cheek is smushed against Sakura’s shoulder, turning her expressions hazy, like watercolours blurring

“’re be-ou-ti-ful. ‘d j’ know? Mhmm. So…” Ino raises a hand and rests it clumsily on Sakura’s cheek. “You shoul’ know.”

And Ino’s always been insistent with compliments, saying them with as much blunt truth as her insults, but this is—

Sakura doesn’t know, but there’s something too much in the slurred words. There’s something too much swimming in Ino’s eyes.

 

 

 

**ii.**

 

“She isn’t a thing you can just pick up when it’s convenient!”

Sakura had almost missed them, they’ve both got their chakra tamped so far down, but Ino’s furious hiss slithers up her spine and wraps around her throat.

Sakura freezes.

“Don’t you shrug me off, Uchiha,” Ino continues. “I know you think you’re better than the rest of us, but if you hurt her, I will ruin you.”

Sasuke makes a dismissive sound, but it’s abruptly cuts off.

Sakura is frozen.

She should stop this.

They could hurt each other.

But she needs—

Sakura doesn’t know what she needs.

“I’m not scared of your fancy eyes,” Ino sneers. “You think you can hurt me with those? I’ll have you jabbering, mindless, at my feet before you’ve even finished the thought. Hurt Sakura, and I’ll make sure that the Uchiha die forever.”

Sakura runs before they notice her.

She should be angry at Ino for threatening Sasuke; Sakura isn’t something that needs protecting.

But—

She can picture Sasuke’s haughty disdain perfectly.

And he never even promised not to hurt her.

(She wonders if it’s too much to ask of him, given their history.)

 

 

 

**iii.**

 

As Sakura stands frozen in the doorway, she thinks that she really needs to stop this habit of happening upon Ino when she’s got people pressed up against walls.

There’s a sharp curve of a woman pressing up into Ino’s firm grip, her hands pulling Ino’s perfect hair into artful disarray.

Ino’s hand is lost amidst the folds of clothing, but the woman is panting and Ino is murmuring into her cheek, “oh, babe, just like that, you’re so good, you feel so good, c’mon c’mon,” all hot praise and a slash of violent lipstick.

Sakura scrambles backwards and back into the bar, ensuring that the door closes behind her without a sound.

She—

Sakura hadn’t known Ino was into women.

She—

Why isn’t that something she already knows?

 

 

 

**iv.**

 

“Maybe I’m just destined for misery,” Sakura laughs.

It’s not a very nice laugh.

Ino scowls down at her.

From her blanket handle on Ino’s bed, Sakura scowls back.

“I just broke off my engagement to the boy of my dreams. I’m allowed to be bitter.”

“Stop fucking wallowing. You’re better off. Sasuke is a selfish little boy who never grew up. He’d have asked you to destroy yourself and you would have done it.”

Sakura looks away.

Ino, as always, doesn’t. But she does sigh. “Fine,” Ino continues, her voice lacking the same sharp edges. “You can wallow for tonight. But don’t let him ruin you this way, too. You deserve better, Sakura.”

Ino says it.

It must be true.

Even so, Sakura wraps herself tighter in blankets and shies away from it, as always.

It hurts to much, to admit that her dreams were nothing so much as cobwebs and the aftertaste of bitter almonds.

“No one deserves you,” Ino murmurs, much later, her fingers in Sakura’s hair having lulled her mostly to sleep, their breathing even and deep. “Least of all selfish creatures likes Sasuke and me.

 

 

 

**v.**

 

“Why won’t you just tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Ino yells back, blue eyes too close.

Sakura’s gaze glances down to Ino’s mouth, and away.

“Stop lying to me!”

“Stop lying to yourself!”

Sakura wants to shake her.

Sakura wants to hit her.

Sakura wants to bloody her.

Sakura wants to put marks all over her.

Sakura wants to make Ino hers.

She clenches her hands tight enough to make her palms bleed for the way that her fingernails are slicing a them, instead.

She can’t even remember what they’re fighting about.

“How am I lying, Ino?”

“Because,” Ino spits, and she tries to shove Sakura with both hands, but Sakura just plants her feet and exerts a bit of chakra and doesn’t move. “Because you keep pretending that you don’t know I’m in love with you, and it’s breaking my heart.”

Before today, Sakura would have thought she would win a footrace with Ino.

She was wrong.

She should have accounted for the fact that Ino is a terrible cheat.

 

 

 

Amongst her varied skill set, Sakura can set a mean trap.

Or, well, she can go sit forlornly in Chōji’s kitchen, raiding his snack stashes, until Chōji’s soft heart and Shikamaru’s inability to put up with Ino’s dramatics kick in, and they arrange to make sure Ino ends up in the same room with her.

Which, Sakura would argue, is setting a trap. Just not in the traditional shinobi sense.

Kakashi-sensei would be proud of her, arranging for her friends to do the hard work for her.

Ino bounces off the window when she tries to bolt through it.

Sakura loves seals.

“I’m going to skin Naruto alive and feed him to his toads,” Ino spits.

Sakura sniffs. “I don’t think the toad summons go for red meat, actually.”

Ino doesn’t turn around. “There’s a first time for everything. And I can be persuasive.”

“I know,” Sakura says. “Which is why I’m so surprised you didn’t, oh I don’t know, try to seduce me?”

Ino’s back stiffens and the room goes cold.

“Don’t,” she says: glass and razor blades and bitter coffee grounds. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do this, Sakura. Don’t think that. I would never— you’re my best friend.”

Sakura is stunned for a moment, caught off guard by the broken crack right through Ino’s voice.

Oh.

Oh no.

Oh, Ino.

“You’re my best friend,” Sakura echoes back. “You should have told me.”

At some point, she’s stood to stand at Ino’s back, a hand hovering over the panicked rounding of her shoulders.

“Ino, you should have said something.”

“And make you pity me?” Ino whirls, eyes blazing. “Make you feel guilty? Make you feel like you owed me? I’m not Sasuke, Sakura, I wouldn’t trick you into something you didn’t want but didn’t know how to refuse.”

She’s a livewire. She’s a lightning storm.

Sakura, unflinchingly, places a hand on Ino’s cheek.

“Ino,” she smiles, soft and fond. “When have I ever not known how to fight you?”

Ino sobs.

Sakura catches her as she sags.

They fall together, to their knees.

“You should have told me,” Sakura says, “so that I could have said it back.”

Ino’s fingers twist in the back of Sakura’s shirt and her tears carve channels in Sakura’s skin.

“I love you,” Sakura tells her.

Her voice is firmament.

Her words ring like bells.

It’s just truth.

“I love you,” Sakura says.

(It’s Ino, after all, who taught her that truth was the best weapon, who taught her that facing the truth would make her strong.

She’s right. As always. (Not that Sakura will tell her that.)

Loving Ino has only ever made Sakura strong.)


	11. you left me breathless (found you in the vacuum of space)

**ii.**

Ino kisses Sakura the way she always kisses her: violent and messy, like it might just be their last.

And Sakura is right there with her, all teeth and tongue, because the world is burning down around them and every moment they manage to steal together is worth surviving another bloody day and another sleepless night.

Ino licks the despair from Sakura’s mouth, steals the breath from her.

Sakura barely feels the blade as it slips between her ribs, it’s so sharp.

This is what betrayal tastes like: Ino’s hands around a blade and Ino’s teeth set to her lip and Ino’s gaze boring into her, the only thing in the world Sakura can see.

_Trust me, trust me, trust me_.

As Sakura bleeds out, crimson and pink, her last memory is the sight of Ino’s back as she dons a bone mask and slips away, tendrils pulling at her heels.

 

 

 

**iii.**

Haruno Sakura dies in her cold bedroom with nothing but the soft moonlight and a lingering perfume for company.

Yamanaka Ino sinks down, down, down into the dark, to find her rest at the roots of some great tree.

They are both deaths of a sort.

 

 

 

**iv.**

“Oh child,” croons Shimura Danzō.

His fingers are skeletal on Ino’s chin, a mockery of gentleness.

“Your Village thanks you for your sacrifice.”

“What sacrifice?” Her face may as well be bone for all the emotion sketched across it, a gruesome slash of pink under two blue pools deeper than the most unknown of oceans.

Danzō smiles and curls his fingers tighter, all possession and sweet victory.

 

 

 

**v.**

A green-tipped hand pierces the soft night, disrupting a bouquet of sunflowers.

Then, a second hand, and a ghost pulls itself from its grave.

“Lee is going to cry when he visits, only to find that someone vandalized the flowers he brought you,” Shikamaru drawls.

Sakura wipes the dirt from her eyes so that she can glance at him where he’s leaning against her headstone, the bright cherry end of his cigarette the only colour in the world.

She tries on a smile that doesn’t touch more than her mouth.

(It still aches for what is missing.)

“I’ll apologize when I get the chance,” she says. And catches the bag as it slams into her chest.

“Best run now,” Shikamaru says. “The gap in the patrol is about to come up. Hinata will find you once you’re out of the village.”

Sakura nods. “Be safe.”

Shikamaru barks out a laugh. It echoes in the curl of Sakura’s hands. “Stay dead.”

With that last order, that last well wish, Sakura runs.

Her hair streams out behind her in a banner, silver in the sliver of moonlight that dares peek around the clouds.

At her back, Konoha is dark and subdued, its night life snuffed out the way Tsunade-shishō was extinguished, the way Naruto is a shell of a man, bound with so many chakra chains that she doesn’t know that they’ll find anything of him left if they ever manage to break him free.

Sakura runs.

This is not the end.

Lingering under her tongue is the taste of champagne and blood, and Ino’s promise.

 

 

 

**i.**

“It has to be you,” Ino whispers against Sakura’s lips after they’ve caught their breath.

It’s stifling under their cocoon of blankets, but here, in their bed, is the only place it is remotely safe to speak of treason.

“No.” No. It cannot be Sakura; it never has been. She is only ever herself, and she has never been enough.

“Yes,” Ino insists. “Who you are  _matters_ , Sakura. Matters in a way that is bigger than your insecurities. Who you are and who you are to so many people  _matters_.”

“I’m no one.”

“Sasuke is dead, Sakura. And Naruto is captured and Kakashi is missing. You’re the only one left. It has to be you.”

Sakura could scream for it.

She knows. She  _knows_.

But she cannot.

She doesn’t have the strength for it. She never has.

“Sakura. Please.”

“Don’t make me, Ino.”

This will ruin her.

This will ruin them.

Ino closes her eyes. “It doesn’t matter what we want, Sakura. All that matters is what we can do. And I will not let this go on. I will not. I will die, if that is what it takes. I will kill all of us, if that’s what it takes.”

Sakura inhales sharply.

No.

_Ino_.

“I love you, Sakura, but I love Konoha more. And I will not let the children of my clan be ground down as fodder for Danzō’s war machine. Not while there is still breath in my body. And I will use you and every single person who feels the same way, if I need to.”

Sakura kisses her then, kisses the breath from her body so that Ino does not do this to them.

But even as she does so, Sakura is crying, because she knows that she’s going to let Ino kill them both.

Sakura is the last of Team 7. And that means something when Danzō is so terrified and so envious of the long, long shadow that legacy casts.

And Sakura is more, too. Senju Tsunade’s successor, carrying death in one hand and life in the other. The reminder that there is strength in weakness and that flowers bloom all the brighter in adversity. And, always, Ino’s.

“I love you,” Sakura gives to Ino, and she picks up the hand that is going to kill her, pressing kisses to the pad of each calloused finger. “I love you.”

They die a thousand deaths in each other’s arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt:** "You let me breathless" for Femslash February.


	12. dreaming of hayley kiyoko music videos under the oppressive heat of summer, the endless span of your youth before you

Sakura puts her mouth around her bottle of cider again, more as an excuse for why she’s not talking than anything else. She’s not particularly enjoying the taste, but it gives her something to do with her hands, given that she tore the label to shreds about an hour ago.

She blows across the top, angling the bottle to produce a clear ringing sound and plays with it a bit, the note slipping higher and lower, only to peter out when she tips the bottle too far and the air doesn’t pass over the lip right.

It’s not like anyone is paying any attention.

She tries to remember why she’s here in the first place and, oh right, Naruto.

Because, like most instances in Sakura’s life where she’s ended up somewhere she hadn’t planned and doesn’t particularly want to be, it’s Naruto’s fault.

She could always push through the house looking for him, or for Sai who she’s pretty sure she saw playing what looked like an incredibly awkward game of Truth or Dare for everyone else involved earlier, or Hinata even, who was posted up on the corner of a couch with Shino guarding her side and Kiba sprawled at her feet. But that means probably getting drawn into yet another conversation with a peer she didn’t know knew her about what her post-graduation plans are, so.

Sakura is going to stay here in the small corner hidden between the smushed together love seat and couch, hiding with her cider, thank you very much.

Maybe, at some point, she’ll get through the bottle and the 4.5% alcohol content will finally kick in and overcome her currently crippling social anxiety. (It’s been a long week, a long month, a long year, with too many social situations and too much stress and Sakura really doesn’t know why she’s here when she could finally be sleeping in her own bed for a period longer than the maybe six hours she’s been surviving off of for too long.)

Sakura is so occupied with her shoulders up around her ears and the music throbbing through the floorboards is obnoxious enough that it takes someone nearly stepping on her for Sakura to notice that there’s someone trying to crawl into her space.

If it’s someone looking for a warm body to cuddle up with or a pair of soft lips to kiss, Sakura is going to break off the bottom of her bottle on the ground and shank them with it.

“Fuck,” says Someone. “I didn’t think anyone else would be coordinated enough to climb back here? You didn’t, like, crawl in before your alcohol consumption caught up with you only to find yourself drunk and stuck, did you? Because I’m pretty sure I can’t move the couch given that it’s currently holding what I’m pretty sure is four distinct sleeping bodies, and I really don’t want to get thrown up on tonight. Also, I need to hide.”

Sakura is blinking and trying to digest all of that, and so squawks in surprise when Someone catches her in the chin with their knee before squeezing in beside her.

“Please take your hair out of my mouth,” is what Sakura is going to say, but then she realizes exactly just who Someone is, and snaps her mouth shut.

Which, ew, she really doesn’t need anyone’s hair in her mouth, let alone a person who is not herself.

“Oh,” says Ino Yamanaka, “hey Sakura, I didn’t know you were coming tonight!”

Sakura spits Ino’s hair out of her mouth, and then spits out, “I don’t think I knew you know who I was.”

Ino raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow. “We’ve gone to school together for, like, five years. And we’ve been in at least two, no, three classes together. Also, you, like, were routinely in the school newsletter and shit for winning rugby tournaments and, like, eleventy billion academic awards. Of course I know who you are. Also, like, you’ve dyed your hair pink the entire time I’ve known you. Which is totally badass.”

Ino Yamanaka knows who Sakura is.

Ino Yamanaka thinks she’s badass.

Sakura takes a drink of her cider and flinches at the taste.

“Why do you need to hide?” she asks, smoothly changing the conversation.

Because, like, oh. Duh. Of course Ino knows who she is. Apparently everyone in her graduating class knows who she is. Sakura is wondering why this is a revelation considering she knows who Ino is.

Ino purses her lips, but doesn’t call Sakura out on her frankly terrible transition.

How exactly, Sakura wonders, has Ino managed to get her lipstick to stick around all evening? It’s as flawless and bright as it was at 8:00 this morning when they all sleepily shambled into the school gym, tripping in heels and getting strangled to death by ties, for the last rehearsal before the convocation ceremony started.

“Hidan and his group of assholes showed up, despite the fact that they graduated two years ago and from a different school, and after last time, Shikamaru said he’d tell my mom if I fought them again and broke a wall,” Ino says, like it’s no big deal.

Sakura doesn’t know who Hidan or his group of assholes are.

She is suddenly very thankful for this.

Also, what the hell?

Ino sniffs. “I decided it was better to remove myself from the situation. Although, if he tries to kiss a girl without permission again, I’m breaking his face and his hands and Shikamaru can deal with the ensuing property damage.”

What Sakura means to say is: “If it didn’t work last time, what makes you think it’ll work this time?”

Instead, she says, “I’m an eighth degree black belt. And, like, I’m not supposed to actually use any of that outside of, like, matches and practices and stuff, but I’ve also played rugby for forever and I’m really good at tackling assholes who think the fact that I have pink hair and like to paint my nails means I’m afraid of a few bruises. So I’m totally ready to back you up if you need it. I’ve never gotten into a fight before, but I’m pretty good under pressure. Consent matters, y’know?”

“That,” says Ino, “was a lot of words. But I’m pretty sure I caught that. Congrats on the black belt, by the way, that’s awesome. How long have you been doing judo?”

Sakura shrugs. “Since I could walk? I dunno. Like, my sensei knows my mom because they grew up in the same teeny tiny village and my grandmother gave him our number when he moved here. Family legend says that he met me and promptly burst into tears at his first dinner at our house because I kicked my plate across the table because I didn’t want to eat and it was ‘Youthful!’ rather than completely embarrassing. He insisted that my parents enrol me in something when his dojo opened.”

Sakura puts her mouth around her bottle again. There’s nothing in it, but she really needs to stop spilling out enormous amounts of completely uninteresting personal information.

“Please warn me when you’re about to kick Hidan in the face so that I can get it on video,” Ino says instead of standing up and walking away because she can’t stand how much of an embarrassing person Sakura is. “I think you’ll be a viral sensation, and I’ve always wanted to go viral.”

Sakura chokes on her empty bottle and comes up coughing.

“Are you ok?” Ino asks.

And, oh god no, her hand comes up to rub soothing circles on Sakura’s back.

Sakura is going to have to pick a fight and let herself get beat up so that the ensuing concussion can wipe this entire encounter from her mind.

Or, like, she could get super drunk. That would probably work better.

But the fight might leave Ino more inclined to forgive her and so do her the mercy of never mentioning this conversation ever again.

“Do you not like having your face all over the Internet?” Ino asks.

Sakura doesn’t understand why Ino’s voice is all weird.

“Oh, god,” Ino continues. “Is this why your Facebook profile is totally locked to people who you aren’t friends with?”

Sakura is pretty sure the speakers just gave out for a moment, because her heart stutter stops and her ears roar and record scratches don’t actually happen to digital music unless it’s, like, part of the song.

Ino Yamanaka tried to creep her on Facebook?

“Oh, god,” Sakura says, “please tell me you weren’t one of those girls who hated me because you thought I was dating Sasuke for those three weeks when we were all, like, fourteen, before he got so loud at Naruto about the fact that he’d rather kiss Naruto than he would me that Ms. Yūhi gave him pamphlets about the GSA and a detention.”

“I mean, Sasuke is super pretty, but I also figured out he was an asshole, like, four months before that when I finally managed to have a whole conversation with him. Nah, girl.”

Sakura has no other idea why Ino might have been trying to check out her Facebook profile. At least, no reasonable ideas.

“Also,” Ino continues, “you don’t post any stories to Snapchat. I only ever see you in Naruto’s, and you’re almost only ever coming at him and his phone with the intention to seriously maim and/or kill.”

Why does Ino know all of these things about her?

Sakura is going to break the bottom off her bottle and shank herself with it.

“It’s really hard to figure out how to flirt with you when I can’t creep you on social media and research the best method of approach first, you know.”

Nope, Sakura decides, the whole record scratch phenomenon is just her, not the music.

“Excuse me?” she says.

Ino licks her lips and then shrugs.

Sakura can practically hear the “fuck it” on Ino’s face, as she bulldozes on.

“Like, sorry if this is hella unwelcome and uncomfortable. But I really didn’t think we’d ever run into each other before school let out, let alone after, so I decided to, like, seize the day or whatever. Shikamaru has been grumbling at me to ‘woman up’ for, like, the past seven months, so. Whatever.”

Sakura has no idea what to do with her hands.

At some point, she doesn’t remember, she dropped her bottle and it rolled under the love seat.

“You’re cute,” Ino says. “You wanna make out and, like, marry me and retire to a seashore to live in a lighthouse and raise dogs? Or cats. I like both.”

Sakura puts her head between her knees.

“Like, both cats and dogs, and guys and girls, y’know? And, like, snakes and other non-gender conforming people. I’m hella discerning where it counts though: absolutely no birds and no transphobic or other-wise inclined-to-be-intolerant dicks.”

Sakura thinks she might be screaming, but it’s lost to the noise in the room.

How, she despairs, has this little corner between couch and love seat gotten so quiet, so isolated, so just her and Ino?

Apparently Ino Yamanaka wants to mash their mouths together?

Obviously, Sakura fell asleep before Naruto could drag her out of her bed and into a pair of jeans and her sluttiest shirt.

Girls like Ino, with eyeliner as sharp as her smile and personality enough to bend the world, don’t flirt with girls like Sakura.

“Shit,” Ino says. “I’ve made you uncomfortable. Like, you were hiding and everything and I come in here like some asshole and try to put my feelings all over you.”

Ino, for reasons Sakura doesn’t understand, is standing up and trying to climb back over the arm of the couch without stepping on the head of whoever is curled up against it, asleep.

Sakura thinks they might be Kankuro, but it’s hard to tell given that if there are ears on the hood of that hoodie, they’re currently squished and indistinguishable under the pillow the person has pulled over their face.

Ino, Sakura remembers, just confessed to the fact that, for some unknowable reason, she thinks Sakura is pretty and that she would like to date her and maybe marry her.

Sakura grabs Ino’s hand and pulls.

It’s not her best move: Ino slips and tumbles right down into Sakura lap, knocking the breath from her.

Sakura’s attempts to start breathing again are hindered by Ino’s hair in her mouth.

Ino is warm and solid, pressed up against her, an elbow in Sakura’s solar plexus and her face much too close.

This is, perhaps, Sakura’s smoothest move ever.

If she had any game whatsoever, and also any breath in her lungs, Sakura would say something witty that simultaneously mocked and elevated the pickup line “did it hurt when you fell from heaven?”

As it is, Sakura has no game and also no breath, and so instead she wheezes and tries to help Ino scramble up, getting an eyeful of Ino’s skin in the process.

Ino, Sakura is abruptly reminded, is wearing a very short crop top.

Valiantly, or, like, like a fish gasping for breath on land, Sakura keeps her hands and her tongue to herself.

When they finally get themselves sorted back out, Sakura and Ino refuse to look directly at each other like all good and noble and true sapphics.

They do their foremothers proud.

“Do you want to come watch me beat people up and get really sweaty next weekend?” Sakura finally asks. “I’ve a judo tournament, and it’s open to anyone who wants to come watch.”

Ino cuts her gaze through her hair to cut Sakura to pieces.

Sakur swallows heavily.

“How likely is it that you could lift me and pin me to a wall?” Ino asks.

“One hundred percent,” Sakura answers without thinking.

There aren’t many people Sakura couldn’t lift if she cared to.

“That’s hot,” Ino says.

 

 

“Hey, Sakura,” Naruto slurs, his arm swung over her shoulder as Sakura lifts him into her car to drive him home.

He is so going to deserve his mom obnoxiously vacuuming his bedroom floor in a few hours.

Kushina is the best and Sakura wants to be her when she grows up.

“I dunno if you should be driving if you’re too drunk to put your lipstick on right.”

Naruto smacks his head on the door frame and Sakura regrets nothing.

“Check your Snapchat,” she tells him. “And don’t throw up in my car. Also, put your seat belt on.”

Sakura takes a moment to breathe as Naruto fumbles for his phone and the house two doors down rumbles faintly with music. She tips her head back and pretends that she can see the stars.

Huh.

She tries to whistle a bit, and the notes spike and fade on her lips, all disjointed nonsense.

Sakura looks down at her palm and flexes, her hand curling into a fist, to keep the ink there safe.

Ino’s phone number is already in her cell, a purple heart next to Ino’s name and a selfie of Ino smacking a kiss on Sakura’s cheek set as the icon, but it’s the ritual of it.

But it’s the marking of it.

Sakura rubs at the lipstick on her cheek and her mouth, and her fingers come away slightly waxy and ever slightly pink.

Huh.

She opens her door and prepares for the barrage from Naruto, dreaming of lighthouses and of girls with smiles like electric storms dancing along to the music of their dying childhoods and of the endless sprawl of the future she’s suddenly eager to greet.


End file.
